Re: newbie Q: storage management

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Kevin Cline said

<<Evidently not rapidly enough, since that audience never showed up>>

That's wrong. I guess if Kevin's criterion for success is to achieve
universal dominance (say as Visual Basic has done in the PC development
area), then this audience did not show up.

But a substantial audience has shown up, and the use of Ada is wider
than many people imagine (usually statements like the ones from Kevin
are based on prejudice rather than data). For examle, the survey that
JPR reprinted shows substantial Ada use.

An interesting comparison is to look at the proportion of the OS market
held by Unix, and the proportion of the programming language market held
by Ada. The former is of course much smaller, and yet Unix remains a
significant force, and is likely to be one for a while (even in the
context of the NT blitz, Unix will remain a major player, for example,
in the form of Open/NT).

These days, people often tend to regard a product as a failure if it
does not achieve massive Microsoft-style domination. For example, OS/2
is a failure (wrong, millions of users of OS/2 find it essential, and IBM
continues to fully support it), the Mac is a failure because only 10% of
users use it (never mind that the total number is in the tens of millions),
Delphi is a failure (because only 5% of PC applications use it -- but
go visit the Borland page describing Delphi applications in real life --
Ada would be happy to have such a page), etc. etc. etc.

Of course it is a concern that if Ada has only a small part of the market,
then how will the necessary tools etc appear. That to me is one of the strong
arguments for GNAT. The open systems approach of GNAT means that it is much
easier for GNAT to take advantage of developments for other languages and
systems, and in fact GNAT continues to make rapid progress despite the fact
that ACT is quite a bit smaller than Microsoft :-)

A little note on that progress. Mark V systems announced a new product at
STC that does Ada Diagramming. The exciting thing for us is that this is
the first example of an ASIS application for GNAT developed and marketed
by a third party, quite independent of ACT. One of our objectives in
putting substantial resources into the ASIS development was in the hope that
such applications would appear, so it is nice to see that happening! So far
Mark V has not been able to port this to other Ada 95 compilers, but hopefully
in the future other Ada 95 technologies will develop comarable ASIS interfaces
that will allow such tools to be compiler independent.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies