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From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: Why C++ is successful
Date: 1998/08/06
Message-ID: <dewar.902414782@merv>#1/1
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Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1998-08-06T00:00:00+00:00
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Jay said

<<The mismanagement is that the DOD did not push Ada beyond the immediate
requirements of defense embedded systems.  Its a chicken or the egg
situation:  You can't portably rely on GC until a good number of compilers
support it, so nobody uses it and thus there is no pressing demand for it.
This is where management needs to step in and break the cycle.
>>

There are LOTS of applications of Ada that have nothing to do
with embedded systems. It is just that none of these have needed garbage
collection. Note that your criticism would also apply to C++ (though
presumably not even Jay can manage to blame the DoD for this :-)

Sure, Jay thinks GC is an important feature, but this is by no means
a universal attitude. Algol-68 tried to move GC into the mainstream,
so did Modula-3, both failed in this goal. Java is making another
attempt, perhaps it will succeed.

The fact remains that the reason that Ada compilers do not implement
general GC (although of course they can be used with typical conservative
GC gizmos) is that users have not been interested in this feature, and
that includes users with a very wide range of applications.

P.S. if you insist on referring to Jean Ichbiah as Ichy, perhaps we should
refer to you as Mary :-). But in any case I doubt you will get a reply
from Jean, since he is no longer in the Ada world (he works on some
very nice products these days, if you have a Palm Pilot, try visiting
his web site if you don't like Graffiti :-)

In fact Jean was careful to design Ada 83 so that it was compatible with
garbage collection, and Dave Fisher most certainly *did* expect all
or most implementations to implement GC. But Jean's company, Alsys, never
implemented general GC in Ada -- why not -- simple, none of their customers
needed it or even particularly wanted it.

P.P.S. I guess Jay feels that Fortran and COBOL, both of course lacking GC,
are also suitable only for embedded defence applications???