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: 103376,b307bd75c8071241 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: newbie Q: storage management Date: 1997/05/04 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 239288871 References: <5k5hif$7r5@bcrkh13.bnr.ca> <336754A0.41C6@magellan.bgm.link.com> <336A065B.41C6@magellan.bgm.link.com> <5600CF28B69F0B01.A26DF5AC1959B4F2.EBCA9845C622C280@library-proxy.airnews.net> Organization: New York University Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1997-05-04T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Kevin Cline said <> 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