Re: How to make Ada popular. Get rid of ";" at end of statement.

[Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com>]

On Thu, 25 Jul 2019 09:18:20 -0700 (PDT), John Perry <john.perry@usm.edu>
declaimed the following:

>
>My question regarded the late 80s and early 90s, when (as I perceived it then) Turbo Pascal was still taught at some universities, Modula-2 was established in some places and still had a chance, C++ was only getting started, and Ada was required for DoD work. Also, we were discussing a certain kind of academic research, where the libraries you're talking about often don't exist. So, of the point of my question was more along the lines of: with all the safety problems C has (and which C++ often carries over), why didn't safe(r) languages get anywhere?
>

	In around that same time period, the program I was on was planning to
replace the real-time (command/control/telemetry) system -- which was
Macro-11 on PDP-11s -- by a higher-level language to run on VAX-11. At the
time, the real-time group was around 30 programmers, the rest of the
program was in FORTRAN-77 and had some 80+ programmers.

	They (real-time group) ran a survey/study to select the language (which
was only distributed to the rest of the program AFTER they made their
choice). The choices were: keep it in assembler, C, F77, and Pascal.
Wisely, they did reject C as being too error-prone, and rejected assembler
as "why bother to rewrite". They ignored the massive F77 expertise in the
department, and chose VAX Pascal -- prime justification: new hires probably
learned (Turbo) Pascal in school (with a second justification being that
one of the programmers threatened to quit if Pascal was not selected --
manager caved in).

	At the time, doing complicated math in Pascal required importing
functions from the F77 runtime library!

	After seeing the "report" I responded with an email that mentioned that
there was such a wealth of F77 expertise available which would have been
able to assist the real-time group, and then included a conclusion that "as
long as you decided to walk a mile to select Pascal, you should have fallen
the extra five feet to go with DEC Ada" -- a language whose roots were in
Pascal, yet designed for safety-critical systems, and wouldn't have been
any more of a learning curve for existing staff.


-- 
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
	wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    http://wlfraed.microdiversity.freeddns.org/