Re: 7E7 Flight Controls Electronics

["Richard Riehle" <adaworks@earthlink.net>]

"I R T" <rambam@bigpond.net.au> wrote in message
news:oenv7hhc.fsf@pop-server.bigpond.net.au...
> Association with the military was the kiss of death as far
> as many developers were concerned.
>
> COBOL also had the benefit of backing by IBM.

Actually, the story is a little different.  I recall a large USAF
project in the late 1960's where IBM was pushing PL/I, and
pushing it hard.   At that time, there were seven other mainframe
companies that wanted to bid on the contract, but only CDC
had anything like a useful PL/I compiler.

The "Seven Dwarfs" spearheaded by Burroughs and Honeywell
protested the PL/I requirement and persuaded the USAF to
specify COBOL instead of PL/I.   IBM, which intended to let
COBOL die a slow death in favor of its own language, was
forced to revive its COBOL effort.   In the end, IBM did not
win the contract.  As I recall, it was won by Burroughs.

IBM wanted COBOL gone.  The only reason it kept it alive
was to satisfy RFP requirements from the DoD.  In time, COBOL
became the dominant language for business data processing, even
though IBM continued to insist on the superiority of PL/I.

The fact is that PL/I was a superior language.  However, it was
so dramatically different in look and feel from the languages it
was intended to replace (Fortran and COBOL) that neither
language user group found it attractive.   If IBM had been
successful with PL/I, there would probably never have been
an Ada.  The fundamental elements were already in PL/I, but
it also had a lot of inherent flaws that needed to be rectified
before it could be selected.

BTW, the first Alsys Ada compiler was, if I recall correctly,
written in PL/I.   Ada was, and always has been, a far better
language than PL/I, but PL/I could have been improved with
a little effort and cooperation from IBM.   However, PL/I,
at that time, had already earned a widespread bad reputation,
much as Ada has today.   Overcoming a bad reputation for
a language is almost impossible, even when the language
has improved as much as contemporary Ada.

I was in a meeting last week where someone commented, "The
Chair of our computer science department believes the DoD
has banned Ada."   With this kind of misinformation as widespead
as it is, we will have a difficult time digging Ada out of the hole
it is now in.   It has been suggested we rename the language. I
think it is better to follow Marin's advice and simply build the
best systems we can using it.   Also, we need to counter the
idiotic claims made in ACM's Queue magazine.

Richard Riehle