From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 1014db,dab7d920e4340f12 X-Google-Attributes: gid1014db,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,dab7d920e4340f12 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: C is 'better' than Ada because... Date: 1996/06/23 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 162340043 references: <4q8fbo$701@red.interact.net.au> <874508446wnr@t-cubed.demon.co.uk> <4qjddi$26e@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU> organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-06-23T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Fergus said: > From: jont@t-cubed.demon.co.uk (Jon Taylor) > > I suspect the reasons Ada is not more popular than it rightly > deserves are (amongst others) :- > > b) Validated Ada compilers are not cheap. Using gnat is just not > good enought for a commercial system. If an unvalidated C compiler is good enough for a commercial system, why wouldn't an unvalidated Ada compiler be good enough? This is a bit misleading. First there are many validated C compilers (you could have made your point by saying C++, but not C, which has a formal validation procedure comparable to that of Ada, though perhaps the test suite is not quite so comprehensive). Second, the issue of whether GNAT is or is not "good enought" for a commercial system is not particuarly dependent on validation anyway. There are validated GNAT compilers (you can obtain a formally validated version of GNAT, complete with a copy of the validation certificate from Ada Core Technologies for the SGI Indy, Indigo-2, or Onyx, and we expect to validate several new targets in the near future). However, getting a validation certificate does not guarantee usability for a given purpose. For example, if you want to use Ada 95, you may be quite disappointed that a validated Ada 95 compiler may have NO Ada 95 features, none at all! (see the Thomson home page for a discussion of this issue). On the other hand, many commercial systems are successfully using GNAT today, using both validated and unvalidated versions of the system. As for price ("Validated Ada compilers are not cheap"), the cost for example in the SGI case of their GNAT-based Ada 95 development system is essentially identical to the cost of equivalent C++ tools. Robert Dewar Ada Core Technologies