Re: += in ada

[18k11tm001@sneakemail.com (Russ)]

Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com> wrote in message news:<3F952A59.5090001@noplace.com>...

> That and various bad management decisions on the part of the powers that 
> be who were trying to create/promote Ada, and you had a pretty horrible

Naw ... I don't believe it!

> reputation right out of the starting gate. This reputation spread like 
> wildfire and has been *enormously* hard to overcome. Some of it is 
> reality and some of it is myth, but in the world of "Marketing" - 
> "Perception *IS* Reality".
> 
> Hence - back on subject - I see no reason to believe that adding trivial 
> syntax changes is going to in any way win over the crowd that hated Ada 
> for a hell of a lot bigger things than lack of a "+=" operator.

That's all very interesting, but the fact is that Ada was mandated by
the DoD for much more than just embedded systems. My understanding is
that it was mandated for pretty much everything, right down to
personnel management and payroll systems.

So here you had a $300,000,000,000/year behemoth driving the adoption
of a particular programming language like nothing we've ever seen
before or since -- and never will, for that matter. That in itself
blows all the excuses out of the water as far as I am concerned. Think
about it. If the DoD spent only 1% of its budget on software, that was
approximately $3,000,000,000/year going directly to Ada development.
And I'll bet they spend *much* more than 1%.

You know I agree that Ada is a fundamentally sound language. If it's
half as good as we think it is, and if it is so much more productive
than C and C++, why aren't the masses who were forced to use it now
singing its praises? Something else is going on here, and I think most
of you here are blind to that reality. You can ridicule me all you
want about ":=" and "+=", but I think the last laugh will be on you
when the reality of Ada's demise finally hits you.