Re: Ada as a first language

[John McCormick <mccormick@cs.uni.edu>]

On Mar 23, 5:02 pm, "Brian" <phaedrus...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> With all due respect to Mr McCormick, his "Why Ada succeeds where C fails"
> should be changed to "Why Ada succeeds where C fails for this hardware and
> these software requirements relating to driving a model railroad".  While my
> version lacks snappy prose, the accuracy is much improved.  Otherwise,
> people might assume that he is saying Ada is superior to C (Or other
> languages) for every situation, which is just plain silly.
>
> Brian Salter

Brian,

Perhaps if you read the portion of my articles that explains WHY Ada
succeeds where C fails you could expand the domain far beyond my
trains.  My conclusions on the problems with scalars has been
confirmed in numerous domains.  See for instance

Eisenstadt, M.,  My Hairiest Bug War Stories,  Communications of the
ACM, vol 40, no 4, 30-37, 1997.

McCormick, J., Forum Letter, Communications of the ACM, vol 40, no 8,
30, 1997.

McCormick, J., We've been Working on the Railroad: A Laboratory of
Real-Time Embedded Systems in Proceedings of the 36th SIGCSE Technical
Symposium on Computer Science Education, St. Louis, Missouri, USA,
530-534 © ACM, 2005.  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1047344.1047510

I agree that Ada is not suitable for many domains, but embedded
systems is one domain for which it is generally extremly well
suited.

John