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From: ichbiah@jdi.tiac.net (Jean D. Ichbiah)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Why don't large companies use Ada?
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 1994 23:40:33 GMT
Organization: JDI Technology, Inc.
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 <ichbiah.54.2ECE3971@jdi.tiac.net> <CzK17K.Ino@ois.com>
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Date: 1994-11-23T23:40:33+00:00
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In article <CzMHDw.L0t@ois.com> beckwb@ois.com (R. William Beckwith) writes:

>Reuse is for projects not for products.

This distinction escapes me.  We were  initially discussing the fact
that to make Ada usable in application development you need access 
to framework of classes.   I maintain that rewriting does not make
sense - in an economic point of view.  The only sensible, timely,
and economic solution is  to interface existing classes and so to
reuse them.

> [...] most software companies partially or completely rewrite their
>products every three to five years.  Look at the most visible examples:

[...]
>    * Borland did it with version 2.0 of OWL.
>    * Microsoft did it with MFC before they even released the first
>      version! (see OOPSLA proceedings a couple of years ago for MFC
>      design team article)

But you are confusing two different matters. In each of the above cases
rewriting produces a version that makes the previous one Obsolete.
On the other hand, if you were to rewrite MFC or OWL just to be able to 
use it in Ada, I presume that your ambition would not be to
obsolete these.

>The products you mention, OWL, MFC, and Zinc, are fairly thin object
>oriented covers above a non-object oriented API.  They are much better
>interfaces that the underlying API's.  However, they are not even
>close to the depth and power of a fully implemented class framework.

Fine that you want something  more ambitious, but you must be aware
that none of the available Ada solution is even at the level of OWL, MFC,
or Zinc: they are at the level of the API - unusable unless you  are very rich
and prepared to spend many more man-years.

 Jean D. Ichbiah