From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Path: eternal-september.org!reader01.eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!news.linkpendium.com!news.linkpendium.com!news.snarked.org!border2.nntp.dca1.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!buffer2.nntp.dca1.giganews.com!news.giganews.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2019 13:31:04 -0500 From: Dennis Lee Bieber Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: How to make Ada popular. Get rid of ";" at end of statement. Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2019 14:31:04 -0400 Organization: IISS Elusive Unicorn Message-ID: References: <5d9a8728-3c5b-4caf-b765-a455ba4d3523@googlegroups.com> <5fb45b9c-d7da-447c-999e-0e8bcce2eed5@googlegroups.com> <1dc13d50-7606-4530-b5cc-19e07b4d4938@googlegroups.com> <2bede4ed-485b-4edb-9fcf-46f49ff82fb5@googlegroups.com> User-Agent: ForteAgent/8.00.32.1272 X-No-Archive: YES MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com X-Trace: sv3-ZnDxKX0P/qBUZEVoAvpPPSwMLX7pM5etP2pWSI22hsUQH2fkCaKo7hFTAuP7ll8A2qoHOuoz+w0h9Yx!WL1fws+xofW2LJ1+oCwwrhunYP5W4lV5IZsjUSfo4YqDBewkWfp6IYlM4NFZelC+cU3JDvau X-Complaints-To: abuse@giganews.com X-DMCA-Notifications: http://www.giganews.com/info/dmca.html X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 X-Original-Bytes: 3713 Xref: reader01.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:56943 Date: 2019-07-25T14:31:04-04:00 List-Id: On Thu, 25 Jul 2019 09:18:20 -0700 (PDT), John Perry 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/