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From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: Why Ada is not the Commercial Lang of Choice
Date: 1997/07/06
Message-ID: <dewar.868213794@merv>#1/1
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References: <33A7FBFF.29D2@mitre.org> <5o9eca$aoi$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>
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Organization: New York University
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-07-06T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


Yasmiin said

<<But my lament is the industry has been here beefore and learned its
lesson.  Remember those days before the wide availability of COBOL on
Minis when business apps were writen in Fortran ?  Well I have to say
giving the poor business programmer C or Ada or C++ is just as bad --
and its poor me who has to audit and read that code -- help.
>>

I find this judgment surprising, but perhaps it is just uninformed. In
fact Ada 95 with a full implementation of the systems programming annex,
including high precision decimal arithmetic with control over rounding,
and full editing, very similar to what COBOL provides, is an extremely
attractive replacement for COBOL. In fact I really don't see any reason
to choose OO COBOL over Ada 95 for this kind of programming (other than
non-technical reasons like existing programmer knowledge, although these
days, with the Y2K problem looming, it is harder to hire competent COBOL
programmers (and more expensive) than to hire Ada programmers.

I quite understand that you have had trouble with C++ used for this purpose,
since it seems totally unsuitable, but I would be very interested if you
have audited Ada 95 code making use of the IS annex that you have found
unreadable (indeed it would be most interesting to know who is using
Ada 95 for this purpose today).