Re: How many of you have Ada programming careers?

[Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com>]

On Fri, 06 Nov 2015 07:46:50 GMT, Nick Gordon <annihilan@gmail.com>
declaimed the following:

>
>Since you guys (and I suppose possibly girls, too) are quite venerable regarding Ada, I wonder how many of you use Ada at work? If you do, did you start with Ada, or did you start as a systems programmer in C, and move over to Ada because of the safety, or something like that?
>

	In one respect, C was the last (compiled) language for me (I include
C++, but know that I'm behind on that too).

	College was (in parallel) FORTRAN-IV, Advanced F-IV, Assembly (XDS
Sigma 6) & COBOL (72/74?), Adv. COBOL, Database (DBTG Network). Pascal
(UCSD), APL, Macro-11 (for the OS course -- can't have students mucking
with the campus mainframe after all). I did a short report on Ada for the
languages survey class in my senior year -- all based upon the SIGPlan
reference/rationale, and a copy of
http://www.amazon.com/Programming-With-Ada-Introduction-Prentice-Hall/dp/0137306970
This was before the NYU Ada/Ed system went live.

	Post-college employment sent me down for a 4-day course in Ada, January
81 -- still no actual programming, just lecture. Mil-Std 1815 had only been
issued a month prior. It was another 24 years before I got to an assignment
using Ada; the program I'd been on was mostly FORTRAN-77 (and didn't fall
under the DOD mandate of "new projects use Ada", since we were
maintaining/upgrading/porting applications that started life in the 70s). 

	Current employment is a mix of Ada (83) (using a cross-compiler hosted
on OpenVMS running via an emulator on a Windows Server), and C. Python for
knock-off processing. Most of my C experience was initially Pro-MC on
TRS-80, and SAS(?)&Aztec C on the Amiga.
-- 
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
    wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/