Re: Anybody in US using ADA ? One silly idea..

[kcline17@hotmail.com (Kevin Cline)]

dennison@telepath.com (Ted Dennison) wrote in message news:<4519e058.0301031434.51a0c880@posting.google.com>...
> kcline17@hotmail.com (Kevin Cline) wrote in message news:<ba162549.0301030124.237c7a7e@posting.google.com>...
> > Not all the antipathy to Ada is irrational.  Most of it comes
> > from sad experience.  Mine was trying to use Ada-83 to write Unix 
> > applications with a Motif UI.  Regardless of any superiority in
> > reliability, the scarcity of libraries and trained
> > programmers makes Ada too expensive for most commercial software
> > projects.
> 
> 
> Odd. That's one of the few domains where Ada (even 83) is almost
> ideal. 

With no access to subprogram types, attaching Ada-83 subprograms to
widget callbacks was a real puzzle for me.  At the time I was doing
the
work (1988) I had two buggy compilers, Verdix for Solaris and TeleSoft
for Silicon Graphics.  Both were expensive, validated, and neither was
anywhere
near the quality of the free GNU C compiler.  Within a week of
starting
to program in Ada I found legal code that one or the other compiler
rejected.  

With no compiler supporting both the target architectures, I was left
to
deal with different pragmas for calling C functions, 
different bindings to POSIX, different bindings to X windows,
and no bindings to Xt or Motif.  Neither had a useful mapping of
Ada tasks to POSIX threads, but instead simulated multitasking within
a single kernel thread.  This was useless for all practical purposes.

We were fortunate enough to have the TeleSoft GUI builder, which in
an indirect way allowed us to connect Ada subprograms to widget
callbacks.

After many years of C programming, it was nice to work in a language
where I was fairly sure that any code that compiled would probably
work.  But most
of the problems with C were solved by the introduction of C++.

After a while I was comfortable with Ada.  But the insular
viewpoint of the original Ada community meant that Ada just
wasn't helpful for the programs I needed to write.

Today, the features that Ada provides have little value
compared with the features that C++ provides and Ada lacks:
the STL, automatic template function instantiation, smooth
integration of user-defined and primitive datatypes, and
bindings to every API in existence.