Re: How many different processors do you use?

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[muddy_buddy]

In article <7jhp34$6f1$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  fmanning@my-deja.com wrote:
> In article <7jh07e$tek$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   muddy_buddy@my-deja.com wrote:
>
> > [...] With the failure of the Ada effort, we again face the problem
> > of having software that can't be run on the currently available
> > processors. Java is just not up to image processing, and C/C++ lack
> > consistant enough standards to insure processor indepence without a
> > lot of work.   [...]
>
> What's the deal with Ada? Was there a lack of compiler? Just curious.
IN MOHO, Ada is indeed better than C, and Ada 95 is more consistant
than C++, if not quite as OO friendly.  I think what happen to Ada is
the following.

1. The Ada comittee went and created their own syntak, and increased
the learning curve.

2. The Reagen adminstration was so anti-gov that they didn't fund a
quality free or at least cheap Ada development system for education, and
small companies.  An Ada development system could cost upto 10,000 $ for
a bad product.

3. Ada's requirements on compiliers made them more expensive, and very
hard to do on DSP, and small embedded Processors.  This meant that
Chip manufactures were reluctant to fund development.

4. The high costs of using Ada prevented widespread use outside the
defense industry.

5. As said before, the government blind insistance that Ada was the
choice for everything, embittered the defense companies and their
Engineers.

6. All of the above has created a situlation, where staffing Ada
programmers is very, very difficult.  Many companies have given up and
switched back to C/C++ including mine.  This problem was made much
worst by the current engineering market, where people need and want to
be able to move often.  Knowing Ada is not a big plus outside defense
and a few related fields.

7.  The killer is that defense programs run for years and thus you like
to start with the state of the Art Processors.  Since Ada is not a
popular language it is almost never supported at the start of a
Processor life cycle.


BTW I know Ada and it is better than C, though the tools aren't too
hot.

Robert Posey

>
> -- Frank Manning
> -- NetMedia, Inc.
>
> Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
> Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
>


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Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <7jjij7$qci$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  muddy_buddy@my-deja.com wrote:
> 1. The Ada comittee went and created their own syntak, and
> increased the learning curve.

Committee? what committee? sounds like you are under the false
(though common) impression that Ada was designed by a committee.
In fact Ada was designed by a small team, lead by one person
who had ultimate authority and control. As for a new syntax,
the syntax of Ada is actually quite similar to Pascal. I can't
imagine that the *syntax* contributes to a learning curve.

> 2. The Reagen adminstration was so anti-gov that they didn't
> fund a quality free or at least cheap Ada development system
> for education, and small companies.

This claim is not even vagely related to reality.

> An Ada development system could cost upto 10,000 $ for
> a bad product.

Perhaps, but certainly there were excellent compiler costing
much less than this figure. In my experience, cost was a small
factor in most situations.

> 3. Ada's requirements on compiliers made them more expensive,
> and very hard to do on DSP, and small embedded Processors.

Dubious claim. Certainly most of the cost of an Ada compiler is
entirely processor independent.

> This meant that Chip manufactures were reluctant to fund
> development.

Actually many manufacturers DID fund development in Ada 83 days
>
> 4. The high costs of using Ada prevented widespread use
> outside the defense industry.

This is a claim without any data to back it up

> 5. As said before, the government blind insistance that Ada
> was the choice for everything, embittered the defense
> companies and their Engineers.

I don't think so, some contractors and engineers were annoyed,
others ignored the mandate in any case, others embraced it and
became enthusiastic supporters.

It sounds like you were not around at the time, perhaps that is
unfair, but your tendency to paint things black and white, when
in fact they were not nearly so clear cut, suggests it.

> 6. All of the above has created a situlation, where staffing
> Ada programmers is very, very difficult.

No, not so difficult.

> Many companies have given up and switched back to C/C++
> including mine.

Some have, some haven't.

> This problem was made much worst by the current engineering
> market, where people need and want to be able to move often.
> Knowing Ada is not a big plus outside defense
> and a few related fields.

Let me get this right. On the one hand it is impossible to find
Ada programmers, on the other hand knowing Ada is not a valuable
job skill. SOmething doesn't compute here :-)

> 7.  The killer is that defense programs run for years and thus
> you like to start with the state of the Art Processors.  Since
> Ada is not a popular language it is almost never supported at
> the start of a Processor life cycle.

Actually it is very rarely the case that defense programs use
state of the art processors. For one thing, it is often the
case that special or hardened versions of processors are
required.

In practice, multiple Ada compilers have been available very
rapidly for nearly every processor being seriously considered
for defence (and commercial) applications.

> BTW I know Ada and it is better than C, though the tools
> aren't too hot.

I am sure this is true of some Ada tools, I am equally sure that
you are not fully familiar with all Ada tools around. Some
people find tools they are very happy with, others do not, a
statement that can equally well be said of other languages (I
know at least one project that is very upset that there is no
good equivalent of ASIS for C++ :-)

But the important thing is to remember that just because your
company moved from Ada to C++ does not mean that it was a
sensible decision, and more importantly does not mean that all
other companies are making the same mistake (if indeed it was
a mistake in your case, as you imply).


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Re: Something doesn't compute here (was Re: How many different processors do you use?)

[Elizabeth D Rather]

David Kristola wrote in message <7jl0jt$qve3@svlss.lmms.lmco.com>...
>IMO, there seem to be two factors moving companies and people
>away from Ada:
>
>1. Companies don't want to train people (it costs money).
>2. Ada knowledgeable software engineers are rare and therefore
>expensive, and companies would rather have a cheap workforce.
>
>While it is most likely true that experienced people working
>with the support of a language like Ada can probably out
>produce (per their cost) entry level <fill in popular language
>name> coders, this does not seem to be taken as pertinent where
>the decisions are made.
>
>Welcome to the race for the bottom (line).


A similar situation exists regarding Forth, which has also been
shown to reduce project costs significantly.  Management is
reluctant to use it because "there aren't any Forth programmers"
while within the Forth community we see lots of excellent Forth
programmers working in C/C++ because they can't persuade their
management to use Forth, because there aren't any....

I think some of these managers are using "bottom line" arguments
as a cover for basic "herd instinct" decisions.

Cheers,
Elizabeth

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Jon Kirwan]

On 9 Jun 1999 08:47:31 GMT, mgk25@cl.cam.ac.uk (Markus Kuhn) wrote:

>http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/linux-ada/
>http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ada.html
>
>GNU Ada95 is the new language of choice for performance-hungry
>former Jabba programmers.

I had a look at your pages, and then on to WUArchive's PAL.  You
mentioned that it's nice to have a paper copy of the documentation on
ADA and I agree.  I do NOT want to be forced into using only an
online, HTML version of the docs.  In a quick look, I wasn't able to
find any information in PDF form mentioned in the FAQ or elsewhere.
This is the form, most convenient for me, to print out two-sided docs.

Specifically, I'd like to get both the Reference Manual AND the
Rational printed out, two-sided, as well as having a searchable PDF
form here, handy for scanning.  It's how I use the Intel manuals for
the CPUs, for example.  Any suggestions?

Jon


P.S.  I read through both of these, the Ref and the Rational, back in
1988 or so, for Ada83.  (I've been programming since 1974.)  Never
used the compiler, but considered it.  I have worked closely with
someone who actually wrote an ADA compiler, though, and we've talked
over some of the issues.  I'd like to give the language another
careful read, but I'm not going to do that via HTML -- I'll need a
paper copy.  I may be tempted to buy one, someday, but I'll look over
the language now if such is available freely.

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <7jm5pa$ome$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  muddy_buddy@my-deja.com wrote:
> In article <7jk7hk$36s$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> > In article <7jjij7$qci$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
> >   muddy_buddy@my-deja.com wrote:
> > > 1. The Ada comittee went and created their own syntak, and
> > > increased the learning curve.
> >
> > Committee? what committee?
> I read someones' website and your right, but that was the
> belief.  There certainly was an approval commitee that took
> too long.

If you think an international standard can be achieved any
quicker than it was, you just don't know how standards proceed.
FYI, the Ada standard process was FAR FAR faster than the C
or C++ processes.

> > > 2. The Reagen adminstration was so anti-gov that they
didn't
> > > fund a quality free or at least cheap Ada development
system
> > > for education, and small companies.
> >
> > This claim is not even vagely related to reality.
>
> It was a major factor.

(lots of irrelevant stuff snipped)

Nope! You completely missed what I said was not related
to reality, and that is the claim that the failure to support
a quality free Ada development system was due to some kind of
Reagan anti-gov attitude, that's complete nonsense. And I am
the person to know, since I am the person who lobbied for this
for many years, and finally succeeded with Chris Anderson's
support in getting this to happen.

> That would be chicken feed compare to what the Ada effort
> failure has costed.

First, I don't see an "Ada effort failure" here. I see many
successful projects that continue to use Ada in an effective
way. Individual companies may have screwed things up for
themselves but don't assume that generalizes to everyone!

> It certainly wasn't a small factor for us, and it prevented
> Ada from gaining any widespread use as a lab tool development
> language, and
> prevented electrical engineers from having access.  10k is a
> whole lot of money for a University,

Your 10K figure is a bogus one picked out of the air. Many
universities had Ada, none I know paid anywhere near 10K.

> > > 5. As said before, the government blind insistance that
Ada
> > > was the choice for everything, embittered the defense
> > > companies and their Engineers.
> >
> > I don't think so, some contractors and engineers were
annoyed,
> > others ignored the mandate in any case, others embraced it
and
> > became enthusiastic supporters.
>
> At least NVL viewed it as an all or nothing deal.  We had a
> signal processing intensive application that we wanted to do
> on 2 320c25 DSP's which had no Ada support.  At the time
> (1985-88) there
> was not an Ada supporting processor that could do the Signal
> processing
> at a reasonable rate.  The signal processing was pretty much a
> fixed process once designed, and all the SW that was likely to
> change was on one processor.  We offered to use a 680x0
> processor with
> Ada for the second processor, but that wasn't a pure solution.

Sounds like quite a bit of mismanagement there to me!

> In addition, the government raised our SW costs by 2x by
insisting that
> it either be Ada or assembly and thus no C.  Since the 320c25
or the
> Motorala 5600 DSP had C compliers, but no Ada we wrote
everything in
> Assembly instead of just the inner loops.

You had other alternatives, again sounds like bad management.
For one thing, the Ada mandate absolutely did not apply in
cases where no Ada compiler was available, so either your
facts are distorted, or you REALLY had a case of completely
messed up management.

It sounds in general like things were mismanaged. Ada is not
some magic cure-all for bad management!

If you can't get Ada programmers to work in your environment,
perhaps it is because there is something wrong with your
environment. Lots of other Ada shops I know manage to attract
and retain good people.





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Re: How many different processors do you use?

[dennison]

In article <375ead38.430770910@news.easystreet.com>,
  jkirwan@easystreet.com (Jon Kirwan) wrote:
> I had a look at your pages, and then on to WUArchive's PAL.  You
> mentioned that it's nice to have a paper copy of the documentation on
> ADA and I agree.  I do NOT want to be forced into using only an
> online, HTML version of the docs.  In a quick look, I wasn't able to
> find any information in PDF form mentioned in the FAQ or elsewhere.
> This is the form, most convenient for me, to print out two-sided docs.

The RM is available in HTML, ASCII, and Postscript format at
http://www.adahome.com/Resources/refs/rm95.html

A similar page for the rationale is at
http://www.adahome.com/Resources/refs/rat95.html

--
T.E.D.


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Re: How many different processors do you use?

[muddy_buddy]

In article <7jmmqi$vm2$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> In article <7jm5pa$ome$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   muddy_buddy@my-deja.com wrote:
> > In article <7jk7hk$36s$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
> >   Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> > > In article <7jjij7$qci$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
> > >   muddy_buddy@my-deja.com wrote:
> > > > 1. The Ada comittee went and created their own syntak, and
> > > > increased the learning curve.
> > >
> > > Committee? what committee?
> > I read someones' website and your right, but that was the
> > belief.  There certainly was an approval commitee that took
> > too long.
>
> If you think an international standard can be achieved any
> quicker than it was, you just don't know how standards proceed.
> FYI, the Ada standard process was FAR FAR faster than the C
> or C++ processes.

Perhaps the offical process was, but there were C compliers out before
the sign off.  Its that true of Ada 95?
>
> > > > 2. The Reagen adminstration was so anti-gov that they
> didn't
> > > > fund a quality free or at least cheap Ada development
> system
> > > > for education, and small companies.
> > >
> > > This claim is not even vagely related to reality.
> >
> > It was a major factor.
>
> (lots of irrelevant stuff snipped)
>
> Nope! You completely missed what I said was not related
> to reality, and that is the claim that the failure to support
> a quality free Ada development system was due to some kind of
> Reagan anti-gov attitude,
I guess my dislike of Reagen may have made me assume it was his fault
that the government didn't support the obvious method of getting Ada
accepted.  However, there were government people pointing that out
as a reason in the 80's.


>
> > That would be chicken feed compare to what the Ada effort
> > failure has costed.
>
> First, I don't see an "Ada effort failure" here. I see many
> successful projects that continue to use Ada in an effective
> way. Individual companies may have screwed things up for
> themselves but don't assume that generalizes to everyone!

The goal of the Ada project was to standardize defense deptmart
software on Ada.  Since there are many defense contractors rapidily
retreating from Ada support over ten years past the deadlines I don't
see how the orginal effort can be considered anything but a failure.
Perhaps Ada 95 and all the wonderful commerical support can restart the
effort, but for now I think it has failed at its goal.


>
> > It certainly wasn't a small factor for us, and it prevented
> > Ada from gaining any widespread use as a lab tool development
> > language, and
> > prevented electrical engineers from having access.  10k is a
> > whole lot of money for a University,
>
> Your 10K figure is a bogus one picked out of the air. Many
> universities had Ada, none I know paid anywhere near 10K.

The 10k number as the price I remember for the development system
we got.  It could be wrong, but it certainly wasn't picked out of the
air.  It was a system for a 320c30 if I remember correctly.
>

> Sounds like quite a bit of mismanagement there to me!

Agreed, but the government's mismanagement of the Ada effort was
the whole point of my orginal post, not any attack on the Ada
language.  I wish they had done a better job.


> You had other alternatives, again sounds like bad management.
> For one thing, the Ada mandate absolutely did not apply in
> cases where no Ada compiler was available, so either your
> facts are distorted, or you REALLY had a case of completely
> messed up management.
>
See above, the Ada language itself was a minor problem.  The
way the government supported it was cause of the lack of
acceptance.  The same government agency also tried to get us
to do Ada Peudo code for PLD's.  I not positive our own managament
wasn't at fault for some of this, but the Government's Ada effort
must of made them think thats what the customer wanted.

> It sounds in general like things were mismanaged. Ada is not
> some magic cure-all for bad management!
>
> If you can't get Ada programmers to work in your environment,
> perhaps it is because there is something wrong with your
> environment. Lots of other Ada shops I know manage to attract
> and retain good people.

Admittely we have a lot of problem finding any programmers to work
here, but adding Ada to the requirements just makes it worst.  When
you have a defense contractor in a hot engineering market, retension
becomes a real problem.


>
> Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
> Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
>


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Ada95 (was: How many different processors do you use?)

[Markus Kuhn]

jkirwan@easystreet.com (Jon Kirwan) writes:
|> On 9 Jun 1999 08:47:31 GMT, mgk25@cl.cam.ac.uk (Markus Kuhn) wrote:
|> >http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/linux-ada/
|> >http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ada.html
|> >
|> >GNU Ada95 is the new language of choice for performance-hungry
|> >former Jabba programmers.
|> 
|> I had a look at your pages, and then on to WUArchive's PAL.  You
|> mentioned that it's nice to have a paper copy of the documentation on
|> ADA and I agree.  I do NOT want to be forced into using only an
|> online, HTML version of the docs.  In a quick look, I wasn't able to
|> find any information in PDF form mentioned in the FAQ or elsewhere.
|> This is the form, most convenient for me, to print out two-sided docs.

The rationale and reference manual of Ada95 are available in
Postscript on

  ftp://cs.nyu.edu/pub/gnat/rationale-ada95/
  ftp://cs.nyu.edu/pub/gnat/rm9x-v5.95/

If there is a need, I can also send them through Acrobat to
make PDF out of them.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Markus Kuhn]

In article <375ead38.430770910@news.easystreet.com>, jkirwan@easystreet.com (Jon Kirwan) writes:
|> 
|> >http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/linux-ada/
|> >http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ada.html
|> >
|> >GNU Ada95 is the new language of choice for performance-hungry
|> >former Jabba programmers.
|> 
|> I had a look at your pages, and then on to WUArchive's PAL.  You
|> mentioned that it's nice to have a paper copy of the documentation on
|> Ada and I agree.  I do NOT want to be forced into using only an
|> online, HTML version of the docs.  In a quick look, I wasn't able to
|> find any information in PDF form mentioned in the FAQ or elsewhere.
|> This is the form, most convenient for me, to print out two-sided docs.

I have prepared PDF versions from the Ada95 standard Postscript
files on the NYU ftp server. They are now on

  ftp://ftp.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/pub/doc/ISO/Ada95/

You'll find there not only the Ada95 ISO standard (Ada95-RM.pdf)
but also the annotated reference manual and most important
of all the very readable and useful Ada95 Rationale.

Happy reading ...

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>

Something doesn't compute here (was Re: How many different processors do you use?)

[David Kristola]

In article 1@nnrp1.deja.com, Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> () writes:
>In article <7jjij7$qci$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>  muddy_buddy@my-deja.com wrote:

{snip}

>> 6. All of the above has created a situlation, where staffing
>> Ada programmers is very, very difficult.
>
>No, not so difficult.
>
>> Many companies have given up and switched back to C/C++
>> including mine.
>
>Some have, some haven't.
>
>> This problem was made much worst by the current engineering
>> market, where people need and want to be able to move often.
>> Knowing Ada is not a big plus outside defense
>> and a few related fields.
>
>Let me get this right. On the one hand it is impossible to find
>Ada programmers, on the other hand knowing Ada is not a valuable
>job skill. SOmething doesn't compute here :-)

IMO, there seem to be two factors moving companies and people
away from Ada:

1. Companies don't want to train people (it costs money).
2. Ada knowledgeable software engineers are rare and therefore
expensive, and companies would rather have a cheap workforce.

While it is most likely true that experienced people working
with the support of a language like Ada can probably out
produce (per their cost) entry level <fill in popular language
name> coders, this does not seem to be taken as pertinent where
the decisions are made.

Welcome to the race for the bottom (line).

--djk, keeper of arcane lore & trivial fluff
Home: David95037 at aol dot com
Spam: goto.hades@microsoft.com

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Matt Cox]

Not wanting to go into the wheres and wherebys that restricts Ada usage to
mostly military products, if you think that Ada is badly supported then go
and have a look at the Rational toolset (Statement, Rose, multiple
X-Compilers, integrated environment, blah, blah, blah...)

Matt Cox

<Snip>
>1. The Ada comittee went and created their own syntak, and increased
>the learning curve.
>
>2. The Reagen adminstration was so anti-gov that they didn't fund a
>quality free or at least cheap Ada development system for education, and
>small companies.  An Ada development system could cost upto 10,000 $ for
>a bad product.
>
>3. Ada's requirements on compiliers made them more expensive, and very
>hard to do on DSP, and small embedded Processors.  This meant that
>Chip manufactures were reluctant to fund development.
>
>4. The high costs of using Ada prevented widespread use outside the
>defense industry.
>
>5. As said before, the government blind insistance that Ada was the
>choice for everything, embittered the defense companies and their
>Engineers.
>
>6. All of the above has created a situlation, where staffing Ada
>programmers is very, very difficult.  Many companies have given up and
>switched back to C/C++ including mine.  This problem was made much
>worst by the current engineering market, where people need and want to
>be able to move often.  Knowing Ada is not a big plus outside defense
>and a few related fields.
>
>7.  The killer is that defense programs run for years and thus you like
>to start with the state of the Art Processors.  Since Ada is not a
>popular language it is almost never supported at the start of a
>Processor life cycle.

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Markus Kuhn]

In article <7jjij7$qci$1@nnrp1.deja.com>, muddy_buddy@my-deja.com writes:
|> BTW I know Ada and it is better than C, though the tools aren't too
|> hot.

Oh, you definitely should have a look at Ada again! Things have
improved *dramatically* in the last 2-3 years. The old 1983 Ada
language (which was quite nice but had a few nasty quirks)
was significantly revised in 1995 and has now become Ada95 with
full object-oriented programming support, Unicode support,
better task synchronisation, much cleaner semantics, standardized
interface to C, and much more good stuff. There are now several
low-cost and freeware production-quality Ada95 compilers
and development kits available, and there is a very rapidly growing
Internet community around them. For example, there is an
excellent GNU Ada95 compiler now freely available on all
the usual major platforms. There are also several companies
who are happy to provide you excellent commercial support for
this compiler, including porting it to new embedded
platforms if you should need so. You can easily call the existing
infrastructure of C libraries from Ada directly, and many
popular libraray interfaces have already been ported to Ada
and many others are being worked on.

You *really* should have a look again at Ada95 and the tools
available in 1999 and forget *everything* that you knew about the
popularity of Ada before 1997. Ada95 has in the meantime
become one of the most exciting programming languages on the
market. Ada95 combines the comfort and safety of Java with the
performance and low-level access of C/C++ in a very
interesting way. The syntax of Ada95 should be very intuitive
to anyone who was ever exposed to Pascal, but it is better
designed (no begins after ifs, procedure name optionally
repeated on procedure ends, powerful array and record constant
expressions, functions capable of returning variable length
objects without heap allocation, and many other goodies.)

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/linux-ada/
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ada.html

GNU Ada95 is the new language of choice for performance-hungry
former Jabba programmers.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>

Re: Something doesn't compute here (was Re: How many different processors do you use?)

[Jerry Petrey]

David Kristola wrote:
> 
> IMO, there seem to be two factors moving companies and people
> away from Ada:
> 
> 1. Companies don't want to train people (it costs money).
> 2. Ada knowledgeable software engineers are rare and therefore
> expensive, and companies would rather have a cheap workforce.
> 
> While it is most likely true that experienced people working
> with the support of a language like Ada can probably out
> produce (per their cost) entry level <fill in popular language
> name> coders, this does not seem to be taken as pertinent where
> the decisions are made.
> 
> Welcome to the race for the bottom (line).
> 

How true!  And to paraphrase an old expression - you get what you
pay for - at best!

Jerry

-- 
=====================================================================
=  Jerry Petrey - Consultant Software Engineer  - Member Team Ada   =
=                 Lockheed Martin                 Member Team Forth =
=====================================================================

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[muddy_buddy]

In article <7jk7hk$36s$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> In article <7jjij7$qci$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   muddy_buddy@my-deja.com wrote:
> > 1. The Ada comittee went and created their own syntak, and
> > increased the learning curve.
>
> Committee? what committee?
I read someones' website and your right, but that was the
belief.  There certainly was an approval commitee that took
too long.

>
> > 2. The Reagen adminstration was so anti-gov that they didn't
> > fund a quality free or at least cheap Ada development system
> > for education, and small companies.
>
> This claim is not even vagely related to reality.

It was a major factor. Look at Sun efforts to get Java accepted.
They created a fair development system and gave it away.  This allowed
many schools, companies and others to quickly release up grades.  The
Reagen Admin. decide that the free market would produce tools, and
they did according to other posts, just 10 years too late.  If the
government had funded the NYU or some other effort and produced a
easy to use and hack complier and debugger and gave it away.  Ada
would have replaced the nearly worthless PASCAL language as a teaching
tool. (PASCAL is a good teaching lang., but didn't support I/O etc.)
That very idea was suggested to the Government's Ada Backers(by me
at least) and they quote Bonzo's free market concepts as why their
weren't allowed to do that.  I was on a program that considered funding
an Ada Complier and debugger for the 320C25 and it only cost a million
or so.  That would be chicken feed compare to what the Ada effort
failure has costed.


>
> > An Ada development system could cost upto 10,000 $ for
> > a bad product.
>
> Perhaps, but certainly there were excellent compiler costing
> much less than this figure. In my experience, cost was a small
> factor in most situations.
It certainly wasn't a small factor for us, and it prevented Ada from
gaining any widespread use as a lab tool development language, and
prevented electrical engineers from having access.  10k is a whole
lot of money for a University, and out of sight for a hacker.  BTW
in 1987, what good set of Ada tools for a DSP were there that costs
much less than $10,000.



>
> > 3. Ada's requirements on compiliers made them more expensive,
> > and very hard to do on DSP, and small embedded Processors.
>
> Dubious claim. Certainly most of the cost of an Ada compiler is
> entirely processor independent.
>
> > This meant that Chip manufactures were reluctant to fund
> > development.
>
> Actually many manufacturers DID fund development in Ada 83 days

For larger chips perhaps, but embedded processors and Small DSP were
not supported.  As for it being processor independent, I would agree
it should be, but every time we tired to pay for it the complier
companies wanted a whole lot of money.


> >
> > 4. The high costs of using Ada prevented widespread use
> > outside the defense industry.
>
> This is a claim without any data to back it up
That is not true, I provided several of examples of why Ada costs
prevented its use anywhere other than where it was required.


>
> > 5. As said before, the government blind insistance that Ada
> > was the choice for everything, embittered the defense
> > companies and their Engineers.
>
> I don't think so, some contractors and engineers were annoyed,
> others ignored the mandate in any case, others embraced it and
> became enthusiastic supporters.

At least NVL viewed it as an all or nothing deal.  We had a
signal processing intensive application that we wanted to do on
2 320c25 DSP's which had no Ada support.  At the time (1985-88) there
was not an Ada supporting processor that could do the Signal processing
at a reasonable rate.  The signal processing was pretty much a
fixed process once designed, and all the SW that was likely to
change was on one processor.  We offered to use a 680x0 processor with
Ada for the second processor, but that wasn't a pure solution.

In addition, the government raised our SW costs by 2x by insisting that
it either be Ada or assembly and thus no C.  Since the 320c25 or the
Motorala 5600 DSP had C compliers, but no Ada we wrote everything in
Assembly instead of just the inner loops.




>
> It sounds like you were not around at the time, perhaps that is
> unfair, but your tendency to paint things black and white, when
> in fact they were not nearly so clear cut, suggests it.

I didn't think I painted anything as black and white, I think you
should read my post again.  I have worked in either Processor design,
or software in the defense industry for 15 years. I was there, and I
believe I paint a more Ada Friendly picture than most.


>
> > 6. All of the above has created a situlation, where staffing
> > Ada programmers is very, very difficult.
>
> No, not so difficult.
If you can find Ada programmers so easily please contact Raytheon
personnel or call be.  I can get 1500 a piece finder's fee.  The big
staffing problem we have is that we have to fight for SW staff with
the 12's of communications companies in the DFW area.  They use C or
their own languages.  That means it is much, much easier to find C
programmers, and Engineers want to know C to keep their value up.
Ada just makes things harder.


> Let me get this right. On the one hand it is impossible to find
> Ada programmers, on the other hand knowing Ada is not a valuable
> job skill. SOmething doesn't compute here :-)
>
As I stated above, the engineers are smart enough to realize that
they better have mobile skills.  In this market, any SW person can
get a job, but it last for ever.


> Actually it is very rarely the case that defense programs use
> state of the art processors. For one thing, it is often the
> case that special or hardened versions of processors are
> required.
Say what?  I used a prototypes C25, c30 and c40 and others used
proto-C80.  We are using the Power PC G4 processor in this design.
These may not be the ultimate Bleeding edge, but they are not
80386's either.  By the time we get to production, are products are
dated, but we have to start at near the leading edge or face supply
problems.



>
> In practice, multiple Ada compilers have been available very
> rapidly for nearly every processor being seriously considered
> for defence (and commercial) applications.
>
Our tools are dated, and I haven't used Ada 95.  BTW you have
Ada compliers for ARM, PIC and other Micro-controllers.  I will admit
there is a complier for the Power PC.


> > BTW I know Ada and it is better than C, though the tools
> > aren't too hot.
>
>
> But the important thing is to remember that just because your
> company moved from Ada to C++ does not mean that it was a
> sensible decision, and more importantly does not mean that all
> other companies are making the same mistake (if indeed it was
> a mistake in your case, as you imply).

I not sure it is not a mistake myself, but the reasons seem to be
good.  Another problem is defense contractors don't pay as much
money, and thus it is very hard for them to add additional requirements
on recruiting.  The major fears are fear of future support of new
processors and staffing.

BTW several people have said Ada 95 is like Java.  Does it not allow
pointers, and does it have automatic garbage collection?  Java is
dog slow, but it apparently has yielded a large productivy increase
for some companies.

Muddy

Muddy


>
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> Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
>


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Re: Something doesn't compute here (was Re: How many different processors do you use?)

[Jim Prince]

NO, not 'you get what you pay for', this assumes that no one ever gets
ripped off.
Correction: ' you don't get what you don't pay for'
Just my 2 cents.

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Ed Avis]

Jon Kirwan wrote:

>You
>mentioned that it's nice to have a paper copy of the documentation on
>ADA and I agree.  I do NOT want to be forced into using only an
>online, HTML version of the docs.

Why can't you print out the HTML documentation?

-- 
Ed Avis
epa98@doc.ic.ac.uk

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[martin lytz]

oh yes the gpo...i remember when my grandfather worked there printing the
congressional record.  it is amazing to browse their listing of
publications(they stack about as high as an encyclopedia set).  everyone
should check out the usgpo for some great info on everything from building
a bridge to installing an outhouse.  really!!

John Kodis wrote:

> Previously, Jon Kirwan wrote:
>
> > Specifically, I'd like to get both the Reference Manual AND the
> > Rational printed out, two-sided, as well as having a searchable PDF
> > form here, handy for scanning.  It's how I use the Intel manuals for
> > the CPUs, for example.  Any suggestions?
>
> A few years ago I called the Ada Joint Program Office and got my name
> added to some Ada mailing list.  About once a year for a few years
> after I'd receive a very heavy set of nicely printed Ada reference
> manuals, courtesy of the USGPO and my tax dollars.  You might give
> that a try.
>
> I'd have preferred a free copy of the C++ reference manuals, but since
> the government wasn't pushing C++, I had to buy a copy.
>
> -- John Kodis.

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Keith Thompson]

kodis@jagunet.com (John Kodis) writes:
> A few years ago I called the Ada Joint Program Office and got my name
                               ------------------------
> added to some Ada mailing list.

Dangling pointer.  Erroneous execution.  Nasal demons.

(The Ada Joint Program Office was shut down last year.)

-- 
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) kst@cts.com  <http://www.ghoti.net/~kst>
San Diego Supercomputer Center  <http://www.sdsc.edu>                 <*>
One of the great tragedies of ancient history is that Helen of Troy
lived before the invention of the champagne bottle.

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <7jmr4i$1c1$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  muddy_buddy@my-deja.com wrote:
> Perhaps the offical process was, but there were C compliers
> out before the sign off.  Its that true of Ada 95?

Yes, of course! You really should know a bit more about what
is going on before making your pronouncements!

> I guess my dislike of Reagen may have made me assume it was
> his fault that the government didn't support the obvious
> method of getting Ada accepted.

I am afraid your idea that Reagen (sic) took a personal interest
in how Ada was funded is a bit far-fetched :-)

> However, there were government people pointing that out
> as a reason in the 80's.

No idea what you are talking about here! I trust you do know
that now there *is* a freely available high quality compiler
for Ada 95, part of the GNU system.

> The goal of the Ada project was to standardize defense
> deptmart software on Ada.

Actually the real goal was to diminish the great variety of
miscellaneous programming languages being used in the DoD, and
that goal has been quite successfull.

> Since there are many defense
> contractors rapidily retreating from Ada support over ten
> years past the deadlines I don't see how the orginal effort
> can be considered anything but a failure.

Odd, how come if so many people are retreating, then our Ada
business is rapidly growing, and other vendors have also
reported a successful marketplace for Ada. The fact is that
many large defense contractors continue with a strong commitment
to Ada for the kind of projects where it has always been the
most successful. The fact that your company has rapidly
retreated seems to be coloring your view, I suspect that you
are simply guessing based on no good data here.

> Your 10K figure is a bogus one picked out of the air. Many
> universities had Ada, none I know paid anywhere near 10K.

> The 10k number as the price I remember for the development
> system we got.

You do quite a lot of bogus extrapolation from your own limited
experience it would seem. Just because you paid 10K, you assume
that everyone else did -- rather absurd if you think about it,
and certainly quite wrong.

> > Sounds like quite a bit of mismanagement there to me!
>
> Agreed, but the government's mismanagement of the Ada effort
> was the whole point of my orginal post, not any attack on the
> Ada language.  I wish they had done a better job.

No, I was meaning that it sounded like your company mismanaged
its Ada involvement from the sound of it.

> See above, the Ada language itself was a minor problem.  The
> way the government supported it was cause of the lack of
> acceptance.  The same government agency also tried to get us
> to do Ada Peudo code for PLD's.  I not positive our own
> managament wasn't at fault for some of this

That's what it sounds like to me!

> but the Government's Ada effort must of made them think thats
> what the customer wanted.

Don't be too quick to blame nameless government folks

> Admittely we have a lot of problem finding any programmers to
> work here,

So, that's odd, why could that be? Note that this difficulty
is nothing to do with Ada, as I understand what you are saying.
So if you have difficulty elsewhere, it is more evidence that
things are not being managed as they should be.

> but adding Ada to the requirements just makes
> it worst.  When you have a defense contractor in a hot
> engineering market, retension
> becomes a real problem.

Not for a well run company!

I know many defence contractors (and other large goverment
and commercial developers) who maintain large Ada programmers
with good people and retain these good people.

An amazing amount depends on how a company is managed. As I
said, Ada is not a magic anti-dote to bad management


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Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <375ED3DE.DA7C79AA@doc.ic.ac.uk>,
  Ed Avis <epa98@doc.ic.ac.uk> wrote:

> Why can't you print out the HTML documentation?

Well of course you can, but the quality is miserable. In
fact HTML has done a great disservice to the quality of
printed documents, since there seem to be far too many
people who think that the limited capabilities of HTML
as a type setting language are adequate. They are not!


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Re: How many different processors do you use?

[John Kodis]

Previously, Jon Kirwan wrote:

> Specifically, I'd like to get both the Reference Manual AND the
> Rational printed out, two-sided, as well as having a searchable PDF
> form here, handy for scanning.  It's how I use the Intel manuals for
> the CPUs, for example.  Any suggestions?

A few years ago I called the Ada Joint Program Office and got my name
added to some Ada mailing list.  About once a year for a few years
after I'd receive a very heavy set of nicely printed Ada reference
manuals, courtesy of the USGPO and my tax dollars.  You might give
that a try.

I'd have preferred a free copy of the C++ reference manuals, but since
the government wasn't pushing C++, I had to buy a copy.

-- John Kodis.

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[tmoran]

> > If you think an international standard can be achieved any
> > quicker than it was, you just don't know how standards proceed.
> > FYI, the Ada standard process was FAR FAR faster than the C
> > or C++ processes.
>
> Perhaps the offical process was, but there were C compliers out before
> the sign off.  Its that true of Ada 95?
  I have a set of floppies here labeled "Janus/Ada 9X 386 Extender
Ver 3.0.3" with a "most recent file" date in March 1993.  I was
using it for commercial (ie not toy, not research, not defense) work.

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Jon Kirwan]

On Wed, 09 Jun 1999 21:51:42 +0100, Ed Avis <epa98@doc.ic.ac.uk>
wrote:

>Jon Kirwan wrote:
>
>>You
>>mentioned that it's nice to have a paper copy of the documentation on
>>ADA and I agree.  I do NOT want to be forced into using only an
>>online, HTML version of the docs.
>
>Why can't you print out the HTML documentation?

I can, it's just not often nearly as convenient or as pleasing to look
at.  Worse, the HTML docs are broken into sections that would make the
final output look a choppy.

Frankly, I wonder why I'm explaining this to you.  If your experiences
are anything like mine, you'd know exactly what I was saying.

And what's wrong with asking for better convenience, if available?

Jon

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[rawcswi]

In article <7jmmqi$vm2$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> In article <7jm5pa$ome$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   muddy_buddy@my-deja.com wrote:
> > In article <7jk7hk$36s$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
> >   Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> > > In article <7jjij7$qci$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
> > >   muddy_buddy@my-deja.com wrote:
> > > > 2. The Reagen adminstration was so anti-gov that they
> didn't
> > > > fund a quality free or at least cheap Ada development
> system
> > > > for education, and small companies.
> > >
> > > This claim is not even vagely related to reality.
> >
> > It was a major factor.
>
> (lots of irrelevant stuff snipped)
>
> Nope! You completely missed what I said was not related
> to reality, and that is the claim that the failure to support
> a quality free Ada development system was due to some kind of
> Reagan anti-gov attitude, that's complete nonsense. And I am
> the person to know, since I am the person who lobbied for this
> for many years, and finally succeeded with Chris Anderson's
> support in getting this to happen.

In fairness to muddy_buddy, there is a vague connection to reality--
the Reagan administration did have an effect on funding for
academic research, for example.  And he was talking about the
interpretation of Reagan's policies by those who were (in his
view) responsible for promoting or not promoting Ada.  If the
government during the early 80's had dropped a lot of money
into promoting Ada use in universities, many of them would have
started to use it (it supplied a standardized language with
concurrency, exceptions and other things that the more common
teaching language Pascal didn't offer) and Ada might be more
popular today (popular as it may be in some areas, I haven't seen
much use for my modest knowledge of Ada except to speed learning
of Oracle PL/SQL).

But the Reagan administration also put a lot of money into the
military, which must have included Ada (what were they planning
to program the Strategic Defense Initiative in?), and my impression
of the history of GNAT is that the government funded the initial
GPLed Ada compiler (GNAT or the GNAT precursor?), as a conscious
choice to make an Ada compiler freely available.  Is this an accurate
understanding of the lobbying and support from Chris Anderson you
refer to?

--
MJSR



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Re: How many different processors do you use?

[muddy_buddy]

In article <7jn75i$5d5$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> In article <7jmr4i$1c1$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   muddy_buddy@my-deja.com wrote:
>
>
> I am afraid your idea that Reagen (sic) took a personal interest
> in how Ada was funded is a bit far-fetched :-)

I doubt that Reagen was ever capable of understanding the differences
between programing languages.  My point, was the general policy was
responsible for the lack of government funded efforts.


>
> > However, there were government people pointing that out
> > as a reason in the 80's.
>
> No idea what you are talking about here! I trust you do know
> that now there *is* a freely available high quality compiler
> for Ada 95, part of the GNU system.
>
Which has nothing to do with the enviroment of the mid 80's at all.
I also read in various news release how the private industry was going
to provide all this great development software.  From the Embedded
point of view in the 80's and early 90's it didn't happen or it
was hidden from TI.  True we produced quite a few systems with
320c30 and 320c40, but there was a marked lack of support for smaller
processors.  It made be different now.  Maybe Ada will replace C?
Is Ada gaining programing seats at rates equal to C or C++?  Is it
gaining on Java and Visual Basic?


> > The goal of the Ada project was to standardize defense
> > deptmart software on Ada.
>
>
> Odd, how come if so many people are retreating, then our Ada
> business is rapidly growing, and other vendors have also
> reported a successful marketplace for Ada. The fact is that
> many large defense contractors continue with a strong commitment
> to Ada for the kind of projects where it has always been the
> most successful.
That may well be true.  My company deals almost exclusively in Embedded
or test software.  Very low level stuff, and my area is mostly
image processing or sensor control.  This has likely lead to a strong
basis against Ada due to its initial lack of speed, and large complied
size.  We also use a lot of smaller processors that need small download
modules.  Like I said, I like Ada.  However if the Legacy TI part of
Raytheon is typical of Raytheon as a whole, that alone would be a big
chunk of the defense industry in the US.  I also admit, due in part to
dislike of Ada, we never tried Ada 95 in any of the programs I worked.



> > Your 10K figure is a bogus one picked out of the air. Many
> > universities had Ada, none I know paid anywhere near 10K.
>
> > The 10k number as the price I remember for the development
> > system we got.
>
> You do quite a lot of bogus extrapolation from your own limited
> experience it would seem. Just because you paid 10K, you assume
> that everyone else did -- rather absurd if you think about it,
> and certainly quite wrong.
I remember it being looked at pretty hard.  Does anyone have some
price lists from the 80's.  You have already used arguments about
Ada 95 to dispute one point about what happened in the 80's so
I am curious about which view is right.


>
> > > Sounds like quite a bit of mismanagement there to me!
> >
> > Agreed, but the government's mismanagement of the Ada effort
> > was the whole point of my orginal post, not any attack on the
> > Ada language.  I wish they had done a better job.
>
> No, I was meaning that it sounded like your company mismanaged
> its Ada involvement from the sound of it.
I talked to the government rep.s quite a bit, they sure seemed to
guide us that way.  I will admit they weren't the sharpest tacks in
the box, so maybe they communicated.  Maybe my company was at fault
it is more than likely in most cases.

>
> > See above, the Ada language itself was a minor problem.  The
> > way the government supported it was cause of the lack of
> > acceptance.  The same government agency also tried to get us
> > to do Ada Peudo code for PLD's.  I not positive our own
> > managament wasn't at fault for some of this
>
> That's what it sounds like to me!
>
> > but the Government's Ada effort must of made them think thats
> > what the customer wanted.
>
> Don't be too quick to blame nameless government folks
They weren't nameless, I just choose to name them.

>
> > Admittely we have a lot of problem finding any programmers to
> > work here,
>
> So, that's odd, why could that be? Note that this difficulty
> is nothing to do with Ada, as I understand what you are saying.
> So if you have difficulty elsewhere, it is more evidence that
> things are not being managed as they should be.
>
> > but adding Ada to the requirements just makes
> > it worst.  When you have a defense contractor in a hot
> > engineering market, retension
> > becomes a real problem.
>
> Not for a well run company!
Name one defense company of any size that does not have a retension
problem for sites in hot areas.  In fact almost every high tech company
is having problems in Dallas.  From the ads I see for LMVS, and Ball
they sure are wasting alot of advertising dollars if they aren't
losing people.  I Haven't seen one in a week or so, but Boeing was
hiring too as well.





> Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
> Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
>


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Re: How many different processors do you use?

[muddy_buddy]

In article <IkG73.961$2m.35070@typhoon-sf.snfc21.pbi.net>,
  tmoran@bix.com wrote:
> > > If you think an international standard can be achieved any
> > > quicker than it was, you just don't know how standards proceed.
> > > FYI, the Ada standard process was FAR FAR faster than the C
> > > or C++ processes.
> >
> > Perhaps the offical process was, but there were C compliers out
before
> > the sign off.  Its that true of Ada 95?
>   I have a set of floppies here labeled "Janus/Ada 9X 386 Extender
> Ver 3.0.3" with a "most recent file" date in March 1993.  I was
> using it for commercial (ie not toy, not research, not defense) work.

How could you possibly use a non-qualified Ada complier for work?  I
thought that was a strict No-No.
>


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Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <7jol96$kji$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  rawcswi@my-deja.com wrote:
> In fairness to muddy_buddy, there is a vague connection to
> reality--
> the Reagan administration did have an effect on funding for
> academic research, for example.  And he was talking about the
> interpretation of Reagan's policies by those who were (in his
> view) responsible for promoting or not promoting Ada.  If the
> government during the early 80's had dropped a lot of money
> into promoting Ada use in universities, many of them would
> have
> started to use it (it supplied a standardized language with
> concurrency, exceptions and other things that the more common
> teaching language Pascal didn't offer) and Ada might be more
> popular today (popular as it may be in some areas, I haven't
> seen
> much use for my modest knowledge of Ada except to speed
> learning of Oracle PL/SQL).

But this simply does not reflect reality. Yes, it is true that
the NSF was reluctant to support Ada research in universities,
but as anyone around at the time knows, that had NOTHING AT ALL
to do with the Reagen administration, it was simply a reflection
of tastes of the program managers at NSF. ARPA was also not
particularly enthusiastic about Ada support, again, not lack of
resources, but lack of interest on the part of the program
managers. I visited ARPA a number of times to lobby for support
for a freely available Ada compiler, but without success. Note
that it was a HECK of a fight to make the Ada/Ed sources freely
available, but again that had NOTHING AT ALL to do with the
Reagen administration.

(it is easy to see how conspiracy theories get started :-)

> But the Reagan administration also put a lot of money into the
> military, which must have included Ada (what were they
> planning to program the Strategic Defense Initiative in?)

Yes, and the DoD via the AJPO actually provided substantial
funds to encourage the use of Ada in universities. I doubt
in fact that lack of money was a real issue. It is generally
rather difficult to get funds for supporting development of
new courses in universities, but it was relatively easy to
do so for development of Ada related courses, and indeed Ada
had and continues to have some success as a language used to
teach computing in universities.

> and my impression
> of the history of GNAT is that the government funded the
> initia GPLed Ada compiler (GNAT or the GNAT precursor?), as a
> conscious choice to make an Ada compiler freely available.

Well I guess that does show that you were not intimately
involved with the details of the history here if that is
only an "impression". Yes, indeed, the GNAT project was funded
(at about the 3 million dollar level over four years) by the
DoD.

> Is
> this an accurate
> understanding of the lobbying and support from Chris Anderson
> you refer to?

Chris Anderson, as Ada 9X Project Director, was the contract
administrator for this contract. She found the funding, and she
was the one who pushed the contract through, and also provided
us support at all levels (in particular, she also fought to
defend the project against very fierce attacks from some of the
commercial Ada vendors who tried to have the project killed).

I think there is no question that a GNAT-like product for Ada 83
would have been a big help. It did not happen for many reasons,
none of which are even vaguely related to the Reagen
administration (goodness, next you will be blaming the
man for the common cold :-)


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Re: How many different processors do you use?

[dennison]

In article <7jomhf$l5e$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  muddy_buddy@my-deja.com wrote:
> In article <7jn75i$5d5$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,

> modules.  Like I said, I like Ada.  However if the Legacy TI part of
> Raytheon is typical of Raytheon as a whole, that alone would be a big
> chunk of the defense industry in the US.  I also admit, due in part to
> dislike of Ada, we never tried Ada 95 in any of the programs I worked.
>

That's odd. A year and a half ago I got no less than 3 job offers from
various TI sites in the N. Dallas area to do Ada work. Have things
changed that drasticly?

> > > Your 10K figure is a bogus one picked out of the air. Many
> > > universities had Ada, none I know paid anywhere near 10K.
> >
> > > The 10k number as the price I remember for the development
> > > system we got.
> I remember it being looked at pretty hard.  Does anyone have some
> price lists from the 80's.  You have already used arguments about
> Ada 95 to dispute one point about what happened in the 80's so
> I am curious about which view is right.

I know the SunAda (83) compiler went for about that price. But they
(like most Ada vendors) offered a hefty discount to Universities.


--
T.E.D.


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Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Tucker Taft]

John Kodis wrote:
> 
> Previously, Jon Kirwan wrote:
> 
> > Specifically, I'd like to get both the Reference Manual AND the
> > Rational printed out, two-sided, as well as having a searchable PDF
> > form here, handy for scanning.  It's how I use the Intel manuals for
> > the CPUs, for example.  Any suggestions?
> 
> A few years ago I called the Ada Joint Program Office and got my name
> added to some Ada mailing list.  About once a year for a few years
> after I'd receive a very heavy set of nicely printed Ada reference
> manuals, courtesy of the USGPO and my tax dollars.  You might give
> that a try.

Here is information on getting printed copies of the Ada 95 Reference Manual
and the Ada 95 Rationale:

They are available from NTIS, IITRI, and Springer-Verlag:

IITRI:
    Both manuals are available as a set for $40 from IITRI.  They are 
    professionally printed and bound with a sturdy, soft cover.  To order, 
    send a note indicating the number of sets ordered and a check or money 
    order for the total amount due, payable to IIT Research Institute, to
	    IIT Research Institute
	    Attn.:  Judy Hively
	    4409 Forbes Blvd.
	    Lanham, MD  20706-4211

NTIS:
    You must specify the accession number when ordering from either DTIC or 
    NTIS:  Language Reference Manual -- AD A293760 [NTIS prices this document 
    at $61];  Rationale -- AD A293708 [NTIS prices this document at $52].
	    Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC)
	    8725 John J. Kingman Road, Suite 0944
	    Fort Belvoir, VA  22060-6218
	    Tel.:  703/767-8274;  DSN 427-8274
	    
	    National Technical Information Service (NTIS)
	    5285 Port Royal Road
	    Springfield, VA  22161
	    Tel.:  703/487-4650


Springer Verlag:
    ADA 95 LRM & RATIONALE NOW AVAILABLE WORLDWIDE
    Topic:  Ada 95

    New editions of the Ada 95 Language Reference Manual (LRM) and Rationale 
    have been published to accommodate worldwide distribution.

    Ordering information on these new versions may be obtained on the Web 
    at:  <http://www.springer.de/catalog/html-files/deutsch/series/558.html>.

    Ordering information on the LRM & Rationale may also be obtained at:  
    <http://sw-eng.falls-church.va.us/AdaIC/docs/flyers/lrm.htm>.

    J. Barnes, Caversham, Reading, UK (Ed.) Ada 95 Rationale
    The Language - The Standard Libraries 
    1997 . XVI, 458 pp., Softcover ISBN 3-540-63143-7 
    DM 68,-;  29,50; FF 257,-; Lit. 75.090; S 496,40; sFr 60,-; US $ 49,95 


    T. Taft,Burlington, MA, USA; R.A. Duff , Melrose, MA, USA (Eds.) 
    Ada 95 Reference Manual
    International Standard ISO/IEC 8652:1995 (E) 
    1997 . XXII, 526 pp., Softcover ISBN 3-540-63144-5 
    Price: $54.95

 
    Ada 95, Quality and Style
    Guidelines for Professional Programmers
    Edited by C. Ausnit-Hood, K.A. Johnson, R.G. Pettit IV, S.B. Opdahl

    http://www.springer.de/catalog/html-files/deutsch/comp/3540638237.html

    1997. 	SV, 292 pp. (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol 1344)
    Softcover DM 58,- ISBN 3-540-63823-7
    This guide will help you produce better Ada programs by identifying a
    set of stylistic guidelines that will directly impact the quality of
    your Ada 95 programs.

    Contents:
    The style guide is divided into chapters that reflect the major points
    that a programmer addresses when creating high-quality, reliable,
    reusable and portable Ada software. Individual chapters are devoted to
    source code presentation, readability, program structure, programming
    practice, concurrency, portability, reusability, performance, and the
    new object-oriented features.



    You can order directly from the publisher at:
    e-mail: orders@springer.de
    FAX: +49 30 82787-301

> 
> I'd have preferred a free copy of the C++ reference manuals, but since
> the government wasn't pushing C++, I had to buy a copy.
> 
> -- John Kodis.

-- 
-Tucker Taft   stt@averstar.com   http://www.averstar.com/~stt/
Technical Director, Distributed IT Solutions  (www.averstar.com/tools)
AverStar (formerly Intermetrics, Inc.)   Burlington, MA  USA

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Robert Dewar]

In article
<CF6C725329B22060.1AA357EFBB182739.31B09025C1DC53C5@lp.airnews.n
et>,
  kodis@jagunet.com (John Kodis) wrote:
> I'd have preferred a free copy of the C++ reference manuals,
> but since the government wasn't pushing C++, I had to buy a
> copy.

There is one significant difference here, the Ada standards have
always been freely available and copyable, that has not been the
case with C++ documents.


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Re: How many different processors do you use?

[rawcswi]

In article <7jon3l$ldg$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> In article <7jol96$kji$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   rawcswi@my-deja.com wrote:
> > In fairness to muddy_buddy, there is a vague connection to
> > reality--
> > the Reagan administration did have an effect on funding for
> > academic research, for example.  And he was talking about the
> > interpretation of Reagan's policies by those who were (in his
> > view) responsible for promoting or not promoting Ada.  If the
> > government during the early 80's had dropped a lot of money
> > into promoting Ada use in universities, many of them would
> > have
> > started to use it (it supplied a standardized language with
> > concurrency, exceptions and other things that the more common
> > teaching language Pascal didn't offer) and Ada might be more
> > popular today (popular as it may be in some areas, I haven't
> > seen
> > much use for my modest knowledge of Ada except to speed
> > learning of Oracle PL/SQL).
>
> But this simply does not reflect reality.

What doesn't reflect reality?  You seem to have agreed with all
the individual statements above.  How can you know how much
the tastes of program managers at NSF or ARPA were influenced
by the political climate of the time?  Without certainty on that issue,
you can't say whether the Reagan administration's policies alone
had a positive or negative effect on promoting Ada within universities,
and I think that's enough to support a vague connection to reality.
(On the whole, I don't agree with muddy_buddy's claim, but I think
there's enough to justify requesting the additional information you
give below.)

> Yes, it is true that
> the NSF was reluctant to support Ada research in universities,
> but as anyone around at the time knows, that had NOTHING AT ALL
> to do with the Reagen administration, it was simply a reflection
> of tastes of the program managers at NSF. ARPA was also not
> particularly enthusiastic about Ada support, again, not lack of
> resources, but lack of interest on the part of the program
> managers. I visited ARPA a number of times to lobby for support
> for a freely available Ada compiler, but without success. Note
> that it was a HECK of a fight to make the Ada/Ed sources freely
> available, but again that had NOTHING AT ALL to do with the
> Reagen administration.

Well, the Reagan administration did have a substantial impact on
academic research funding; but I would have been surprised if
that had included military related research funding.  And if there
was reluctance to put the funding that did exist into Ada, then
the existence of additional funding might not have made much
difference.  But your comments above do support a claim that
the government failed to promote Ada adequately, outside of
universities, if even ARPA and NSF weren't enthusiastic about it.

> (it is easy to see how conspiracy theories get started :-)

A good conspiracy theory thrives on a vague connection to
reality; no connection or a firm connection would probably kill it.

> > But the Reagan administration also put a lot of money into the
> > military, which must have included Ada (what were they
> > planning to program the Strategic Defense Initiative in?)
>
> Yes, and the DoD via the AJPO actually provided substantial
> funds to encourage the use of Ada in universities. I doubt
> in fact that lack of money was a real issue. It is generally
> rather difficult to get funds for supporting development of
> new courses in universities, but it was relatively easy to
> do so for development of Ada related courses, and indeed Ada
> had and continues to have some success as a language used to
> teach computing in universities.

I was a graduate student in CS through 1985; Ada was a prime
example for courses because it had a lot of interesting features,
but no compiler was available in our department at that time.
Would more money have made a free compiler available?  Would it
have made the department more inclined to commit to Ada as a
future teaching language when compilers would become available?
Maybe.  Your comments seem to indicate that the vision and will
to pursue such a strategy to promote Ada was more lacking than
the funding.

> > and my impression
> > of the history of GNAT is that the government funded the
> > initia GPLed Ada compiler (GNAT or the GNAT precursor?), as a
> > conscious choice to make an Ada compiler freely available.
>
> Well I guess that does show that you were not intimately
> involved with the details of the history here if that is
> only an "impression". Yes, indeed, the GNAT project was funded
> (at about the 3 million dollar level over four years) by the
> DoD.

I don't believe I claimed to have any involvement.  (And there are
still aspects of Ada history that are hard to obtain information about
if you weren't involved (for example, details of the non-Green
languages), despite the impressive web resources for Ada.)

> > Is
> > this an accurate
> > understanding of the lobbying and support from Chris Anderson
> > you refer to?
>
> Chris Anderson, as Ada 9X Project Director, was the contract
> administrator for this contract. She found the funding, and she
> was the one who pushed the contract through, and also provided
> us support at all levels (in particular, she also fought to
> defend the project against very fierce attacks from some of the
> commercial Ada vendors who tried to have the project killed).
>
> I think there is no question that a GNAT-like product for Ada 83
> would have been a big help. It did not happen for many reasons,
> none of which are even vaguely related to the Reagen
> administration (goodness, next you will be blaming the
> man for the common cold :-)

(Not to pursue conspiracy theories too far, but the Reagan
administration's plan to compromise school lunch nutrition
by declaring ketchup a vegetable might have made colds
more common; his administration certainly pursued some policies
that had a negative impact on public health in general.)

Any federal spending or non-spending during the 80s must have
had some _vague_ relationship to the Reagan administration
(which would have had to, at some high level, approve such
spending).  But it is clear from your comments that the funding
available to promote Ada was not the major issue, and another
administration with less interest in military spending might have
been worse for Ada.

--
MJSR


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Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Steve O'Neill]

Tucker Taft wrote:

> Here is information on getting printed copies of the Ada 95 Reference Manual
> and the Ada 95 Rationale:

It appears that some or all of these links are no longer active.  Here's a couple
from Amazon.com that might be helpful...

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/3540631445/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/3540631437/

You might also be able to find them at fatbrain.com but I didn't try there.

Amazon says that these can ship within 24 hours

Steve O'Neill

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Tucker Taft]

Tucker Taft wrote:
> ...
> Here is information on getting printed copies of the Ada 95 Reference Manual
> and the Ada 95 Rationale:
> 
> They are available from NTIS, IITRI, and Springer-Verlag:
> ...
>     Ordering information on the LRM & Rationale may also be obtained at:

As was pointed out, I gave the wrong URL.  Here is a new improved one:

     <http://www.adaic.org/AdaIC/docs/flyers/lrm.shtml>.

Sorry for any confusion.
-- 
-Tucker Taft   stt@averstar.com   http://www.averstar.com/~stt/
Technical Director, Distributed IT Solutions  (www.averstar.com/tools)
AverStar (formerly Intermetrics, Inc.)   Burlington, MA  USA

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Greg Martin]

Is there a reason this continues to be (or ever was) posted to comp.lang.c?
This doesn't have anything to do with Standard C the topic of comp.lang.c
Regards,
Greg Martin
Markus Kuhn wrote in message <7jl9n3$n9j$1@pegasus.csx.cam.ac.uk>...
>In article <7jjij7$qci$1@nnrp1.deja.com>, muddy_buddy@my-deja.com writes:
>|> BTW I know Ada and it is better than C, though the tools aren't too
>|> hot.
>
>Oh, you definitely should have a look at Ada again! Things have
>improved *dramatically* in the last 2-3 years. The old 1983 Ada
>language (which was quite nice but had a few nasty quirks)
>was significantly revised in 1995 and has now become Ada95 with
>full object-oriented programming support, Unicode support,
>better task synchronisation, much cleaner semantics, standardized
>interface to C, and much more good stuff. There are now several
>low-cost and freeware production-quality Ada95 compilers
>and development kits available, and there is a very rapidly growing
>Internet community around them. For example, there is an
>excellent GNU Ada95 compiler now freely available on all
>the usual major platforms. There are also several companies
>who are happy to provide you excellent commercial support for
>this compiler, including porting it to new embedded
>platforms if you should need so. You can easily call the existing
>infrastructure of C libraries from Ada directly, and many
>popular libraray interfaces have already been ported to Ada
>and many others are being worked on.
>
>You *really* should have a look again at Ada95 and the tools
>available in 1999 and forget *everything* that you knew about the
>popularity of Ada before 1997. Ada95 has in the meantime
>become one of the most exciting programming languages on the
>market. Ada95 combines the comfort and safety of Java with the
>performance and low-level access of C/C++ in a very
>interesting way. The syntax of Ada95 should be very intuitive
>to anyone who was ever exposed to Pascal, but it is better
>designed (no begins after ifs, procedure name optionally
>repeated on procedure ends, powerful array and record constant
>expressions, functions capable of returning variable length
>objects without heap allocation, and many other goodies.)
>
>http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/linux-ada/
>http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ada.html
>
>GNU Ada95 is the new language of choice for performance-hungry
>former Jabba programmers.
>
>Markus
>
>--
>Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
>Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[tmoran]

> >   I have a set of floppies here labeled "Janus/Ada 9X 386 Extender
> > Ver 3.0.3" with a "most recent file" date in March 1993.  I was
> > using it for commercial (ie not toy, not research, not defense) work.
>
> How could you possibly use a non-qualified Ada complier for work?  I
> thought that was a strict No-No.
I chose the compiler, and saw no reason to stick to a validated
Ada 83 compiler for this project.  It was in what's now called
e-commerce and needed the reliability of an Ada program to avoid
very expensive errors, but nobody's life actually depended on it
(discounting the possibility of self-defenestration).

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[tmoran]

> Does anyone have some price lists from the 80's.
I bought a validated PC Ada compiler around 1988 for my own
edification.  It cost $99.00
The Meridian Macintosh Ada manual on my bookshelf is copyright
1990.  That compiler also cost about $100, as part of a group
buy via a Compuserve study group.

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Fraser Wilson]

paene lacrimavi postquam Steve O'Neill <soneill@avidyne.com> scripsit:

>Tucker Taft wrote:

>> Here is information on getting printed copies of the Ada 95 Reference Manual
>> and the Ada 95 Rationale:

>It appears that some or all of these links are no longer active.  Here's a couple
>from Amazon.com that might be helpful...

Does anyone know of the existance of a bound copy of the Annotated LRM?

Fraser.
(change sinopsis to synopsys for my real email address)

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <7jomhf$l5e$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  muddy_buddy@my-deja.com wrote:
> In article <7jn75i$5d5$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> > In article <7jmr4i$1c1$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,

> I doubt that Reagen was ever capable of understanding the
> differences between programing languages.  My point, was the
> general policy was responsible for the lack of government
> funded efforts.

But once again, this is totally irrelevant. In fact the
government spent LOADS of money on Ada, including sums well
into the tens of millions of dollars on generating a free
Ada compiler (ALSN). Unfortunately this compiler was not
sufficiently useful to be widely used.



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Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <7jomhf$l5e$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  muddy_buddy@my-deja.com wrote:

> I remember it being looked at pretty hard.  Does anyone have
> some price lists from the 80's.

Yes, of course we know prices, a lot of us were around then :-)

As one example, a complete professional development system from
Alsys for the PC cost $3000, including a 4 meg memory board
which in those days was worth about $1000.

This was the most expensive option for the PC, two other
companies (RR and Meridian) made far less expensive compilers
available.

All these compilers were available at reduced prices to
universities.

You seem to be talking about the cost of one particular compiler
on a chip that was, in the Ada market, fairly marginal. You can
not assume that all other Ada systems cost the same amount.


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Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Robert B. Love]

In <7jonoo$lnk$1@nnrp1.deja.com> dennison@telepath.com wrote:
> In article <7jomhf$l5e$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   muddy_buddy@my-deja.com wrote:
> > In article <7jn75i$5d5$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
> 
> > modules.  Like I said, I like Ada.  However if the Legacy TI part of
> > Raytheon is typical of Raytheon as a whole, that alone would be a big
> > chunk of the defense industry in the US.  I also admit, due in part 
to
> > dislike of Ada, we never tried Ada 95 in any of the programs I 
worked.
> >
> 
> That's odd. A year and a half ago I got no less than 3 job offers from
> various TI sites in the N. Dallas area to do Ada work. Have things
> changed that drasticly?

I believe that most of the TI work in Dallas went to Arizonia.  At
least all the missile work did.  I believe that the compiler went
to Phoenix under DDC-I.

Note that Raytheon in Houston is using Ada for NASA work.


--
----------------------------------------------------------------
 Bob Love                                   MIME & NeXT Mail OK
 rlove@neosoft.com                            
----------------------------------------------------------------

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Everett M. Greene]

In article <7jl9n3$n9j$1@pegasus.csx.cam.ac.uk> mgk25@cl.cam.ac.uk (Markus Kuhn) writes:
> In article <7jjij7$qci$1@nnrp1.deja.com>, muddy_buddy@my-deja.com writes:
> |> BTW I know Ada and it is better than C, though the tools aren't too
> |> hot.
> 
> Oh, you definitely should have a look at Ada again! Things have
> improved *dramatically* in the last 2-3 years. The old 1983 Ada
> language (which was quite nice but had a few nasty quirks)
> was significantly revised in 1995 and has now become Ada95
> [snip]
> You *really* should have a look again at Ada95 and the tools
> available in 1999 and forget *everything* that you knew about the
> popularity of Ada before 1997.
> [snip]

It took 16 years to produce something which is useful?

And this is after it took 10+ years to get to the `83
product?

To say that this speed is glacial is an insult to glaciers.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Everett M. Greene   (The Mojave Greene, crotalus scutulatus scutulatus)
Ridgecrest, Ca. 93555           Path: mojaveg@ridgecrest.ca.us

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Dale Stanbrough]

muddy_buddy@my-deja.com wrote:

" Perhaps the offical process was, but there were C compliers out before
  the sign off.  Its that true of Ada 95?"


You have waded into this newsgroup with rather strange claims about
Ada and it's history. Now it seems you don't really know what the
situation was. Perhaps some prereading is in order.

The answer to your question is, yes, Gnat was available before the
standard was finalised, and it implemented parts/most of the new 
standard.


Dale

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Hyman Rosen]

Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> writes:
> I know many defence contractors (and other large goverment
> and commercial developers) who maintain large Ada programmers
> with good people and retain these good people.

And we all know how difficult it is to maintain those large programmers :-)

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[fraser]

paene lacrimavi postquam fraser@sinopsis.com (Fraser Wilson) scripsit:

>Does anyone know of the existance of a bound copy of the Annotated LRM?

Uh, forget that.  I found them.  Cheers.

http://neptune.fedworld.gov/cgi-bin/waisgate?waisdocid=5235719172+3+0+0&waisaction=retrieve

Or if that doesn't work, go to www.ntis.gov and do a search on "Ada
Reference Manual."

Fraser.

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Tucker Taft]

fraser@sinopsis.com wrote:
> 
> paene lacrimavi postquam fraser@sinopsis.com (Fraser Wilson) scripsit:
> 
> >Does anyone know of the existance of a bound copy of the Annotated LRM?
> 
> Uh, forget that.  I found them.  Cheers.
> 
> http://neptune.fedworld.gov/cgi-bin/waisgate?waisdocid=5235719172+3+0+0&waisaction=retrieve

I fear that the docid may not be a stable number.  I clicked on the URL
above and got nowhere.  However, this URL worked for me today:

    http://neptune.fedworld.gov/cgi-bin/waisgate?waisdocid=114867281+3+0+0&waisaction=retrieve

> Or if that doesn't work, go to www.ntis.gov and do a search on "Ada
> Reference Manual."

This is probably a more reliable method.

> Fraser.

-- 
-Tucker Taft   stt@averstar.com   http://www.averstar.com/~stt/
Technical Director, Distributed IT Solutions  (www.averstar.com/tools)
AverStar (formerly Intermetrics, Inc.)   Burlington, MA  USA

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[muddy_buddy]

In article <7jpi5t$g7$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> In article <7jomhf$l5e$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   muddy_buddy@my-deja.com wrote:
> > In article <7jn75i$5d5$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
> >   Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> > > In article <7jmr4i$1c1$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>
> > I doubt that Reagen was ever capable of understanding the
> > differences between programing languages.  My point, was the
> > general policy was responsible for the lack of government
> > funded efforts.
>
> But once again, this is totally irrelevant. In fact the
> government spent LOADS of money on Ada, including sums well
> into the tens of millions of dollars on generating a free
> Ada compiler (ALSN). Unfortunately this compiler was not
> sufficiently useful to be widely used.
When did they do this?  If they did they didn't do what I would
have, by hiring the most popular tool manufacturer(or maybe the top
two) and have them develop Ada tools with better support than
their best selling product.


>
> Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
> Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
>

--
Raytheon, ATT or Any other company may or may
not agree with any thing I say, write or think.

Muddy


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Re: How many different processors do you use?

[muddy_buddy]

In article <7jpbev$s9c$1@uuneo.neosoft.com>,
  rlove@antispam.neosoft.com (Robert B. Love ) wrote:
> In <7jonoo$lnk$1@nnrp1.deja.com> dennison@telepath.com wrote:
> > In article <7jomhf$l5e$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
> >   muddy_buddy@my-deja.com wrote:
> > > In article <7jn75i$5d5$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
> >
> > > modules.  Like I said, I like Ada.  However if the Legacy TI part
of
> > > Raytheon is typical of Raytheon as a whole, that alone would be a
big
> > > chunk of the defense industry in the US.  I also admit, due in
part
> to
> > > dislike of Ada, we never tried Ada 95 in any of the programs I
> worked.
> > >
> >
> > That's odd. A year and a half ago I got no less than 3 job offers
from
> > various TI sites in the N. Dallas area to do Ada work. Have things
> > changed that drasticly?

Less than 1/2 of the Engineering work went to Tucson.  The RADAR and
FLIR group remain here, and as far as
I know they are not using Ada for NEW projects, I could  Of course
be wrong.  As Far as I know Raytheon has never refused to use Ada or any
other language, its their money after all. There are
plenty of on going projects that use Ada.  My project uses Ada to
support existing code, and
I sure that if the new tools are as good as you say, we may buy new
tools for supporting old code.  However the Government itself is
funding a move to C on one project, I understood they ask for a bid to
convert a Working system written in Ada to C.  Part of this was due to
a dated, and overly expensive processing board in a system with a lot
of up coming spin-offs, and part was fear of lack of Ada support for
future processors.  It has always depended on which branch of the
military you work for.


>  I believe that the compiler went
> to Phoenix under DDC-I.
>
> Note that Raytheon in Houston is using Ada for NASA work.
That is proably a good place for it, but did NASA use Ada for
Pathfinder?

>
> --
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
>  Bob Love                                   MIME & NeXT Mail OK
>  rlove@neosoft.com
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
>
>

--
Raytheon, ATT or Any other company may or may
not agree with any thing I say, write or think.

Muddy


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Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <19990610.7A689D8.FF4B@mojaveg.ridgecrest.ca.us>,
  mojaveg@ridgecrest.ca.us (Everett M. Greene) wrote:

It is hard to know if it is worth answering these points, or
whether this is just a troll, but I will give Everett the
benefit of the doubt :-)

> It took 16 years to produce something which is useful?

No one said that Ada 83 was not useful, a lot of VERY
successful, VERY useful software was written in Ada 83.
Ada 95 is an improvement, but surely you don't think that
all Ford motorcars before 1999 are useless just because
there is a new improved model in 1999!

> And this is after it took 10+ years to get to the `83
> product

Actually it was much less than ten years.

But this is a bit silly in any case. You might as well complain
that C++ has by these standards taken well over 30 years, given
that the original version of C is that old, or that Fortran and
COBOL have taken forty years.

> To say that this speed is glacial is an insult to glaciers

It is of course this silly witicism that makes me think this
is really a troll, but again giving Everett the benefit of the
doubt, standardizing a programming language is a very complex
task. What surprises people in the field is how fast this
process went. We certainly have no examples of the process
going faster, and in particular for example, it took a very
long time to standardize C++, and we still have very few C++
compilers that implement the full ISO standard.

Note that by comparison, Java standardization has just moved
back to square one, with no progress at all, given Sun's
decision that they cannot work with ISO. It may be a long long
wait before Java has an international standard.


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Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Dave Hansen]

This is probably too widely posted, but I can't help myself...

On Fri, 11 Jun 1999 19:30:47 GMT, Robert Dewar
<robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:

[...]
>Note that by comparison, Java standardization has just moved
>back to square one, with no progress at all, given Sun's
>decision that they cannot work with ISO. It may be a long long
                                                      ^^^^^^^^^
>wait before Java has an international standard.

Been lurking in comp.std.c?   ;-)

Regards,

                          -=Dave
Just my (10-010) cents
I can barely speak for myself, so I certainly can't speak for B-Tree.
Change is inevitable.  Progress is not.

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Dale Stanbrough]

mojaveg@ridgecrest.ca.us (Everett M. Greene) wrote:

" It took 16 years to produce something which is useful?"


No Ada83 was useful. It's just that Ada95 is _more_ useful.
I think that the compiler & tool sellers have certainly done
a lot better job recently, but that doesn't invalidate a lot
of the good stuff that was created with previous tools.

  
"And this is after it took 10+ years to get to the `83
  product?"

Not quite sure what you are saying here. 10 years from 73
to 83? 10 years from 83 to 93 (and then another 16? :-)?

Dale

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[David Botton]

Also check out:

http://www.adapower.com/books

If you click on one of the books or do a search it finds the best price for
the book on over 40 on-line bookstores.

If it is not there then just do a search for it in the form at the bottom.

David Botton



Steve O'Neill wrote in message <375FF0A5.5D9D18B1@avidyne.com>...
>
>
>Tucker Taft wrote:
>
>> Here is information on getting printed copies of the Ada 95 Reference
Manual
>> and the Ada 95 Rationale:
>
>It appears that some or all of these links are no longer active.  Here's a
couple
>from Amazon.com that might be helpful...
>
>http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/3540631445/
>http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/3540631437/
>
>You might also be able to find them at fatbrain.com but I didn't try there.
>
>Amazon says that these can ship within 24 hours
>
>Steve O'Neill
>
>

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[martin lytz]

This post has become very, very prolonged and off topic from the original
post.  Could you please refrain from using bandwidth for the ada wars
please?  Ada is wonderful.  Forth is wonderful.  C is wonderful.  C++ is
wonderful.  Assembly is wonderful.  Java is wonderful. All others are
wonderful too.


Dave Hansen wrote:

> This is probably too widely posted, but I can't help myself...
>
> On Fri, 11 Jun 1999 19:30:47 GMT, Robert Dewar
> <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
>
> [...]
> >Note that by comparison, Java standardization has just moved
> >back to square one, with no progress at all, given Sun's
> >decision that they cannot work with ISO. It may be a long long
>                                                       ^^^^^^^^^
> >wait before Java has an international standard.
>
> Been lurking in comp.std.c?   ;-)
>
> Regards,
>
>                           -=Dave
> Just my (10-010) cents
> I can barely speak for myself, so I certainly can't speak for B-Tree.
> Change is inevitable.  Progress is not.

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <7jrlph$n6r$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  muddy_buddy@my-deja.com wrote:
> When did they do this?

This project started in the early 80's before the standard
was released (I am a bit suprised that anyone aspiring to be
knowledgable about Ada during this period -- as you should be
to make pronouncements -- would not know about this!)

> If they did they didn't do what I
> would have, by hiring the most popular tool manufacturer(or
> maybe the top two) and have them develop Ada tools with better
> support than their best selling product.

Which would be???

Borland? Microsoft? hardly, not for an Ada compiler at
that time ... Lumping complex compilers together with tools
in general shows a lack of knowledge of the compiler field
(but then I don't think you claimed expertise in this area!)

In fact it was not clear that the company chosen (Softech)
was not in fact an excellent choice, but for various reasons
this project was not very successful.

The DoD also funded the Ada/Ed effort, a very inexpensive
teaching compiler used extensively, and it is this project
that eventually gave rise to the GNAT project.


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Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <7jrlph$n6r$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  muddy_buddy@my-deja.com wrote:
> When did they do this?

This project started in the early 80's before the standard
was released (I am a bit suprised that anyone aspiring to be
knowledgable about Ada during this period -- as you should be
to make pronouncements -- would not know about this!)

> If they did they didn't do what I
> would have, by hiring the most popular tool manufacturer(or
> maybe the top two) and have them develop Ada tools with better
> support than their best selling product.

Which would be???

Borland? Microsoft? hardly, not for an Ada compiler at
that time ... Lumping complex compilers together with tools
in general shows a lack of knowledge of the compiler field
(but then I don't think you claimed expertise in this area!)

In fact it was not clear that the company chosen (Softech)
was not in fact an excellent choice, but for various reasons
this project was not very successful.

The DoD also funded the Ada/Ed effort, a very inexpensive
teaching compiler used extensively, and it is this project
that eventually gave rise to the GNAT project.


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Re: How many different processors do you use?

[markh]

Everett M. Greene <mojaveg@ridgecrest.ca.us> wrote:
(talking about Ada)
: It took 16 years to produce something which is useful?
: And this is after it took 10+ years to get to the `83
: product?

To be fair, a lot of that time Ada vendors, proponents, etc,
were counting on the government to push things forward.

Now, it is Ada activists pushing things forward with
"real stuff".

So it really isn't realistic to confuse the old Ada mentality
with the new one.

-- 
Mark Harrison                       "Open the floppy disk door, Hal."
AsiaInfo Computer Networks          http://usai.asiainfo.com:8080/
Beijing, China / Santa Clara, CA    markh@usai.asiainfo.com

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <ugnqj7.8e.ln@bigbird.sw.asiainfo.com>,
  markh@usai.asiainfo.com wrote:
> Everett M. Greene <mojaveg@ridgecrest.ca.us> wrote:
> (talking about Ada)
> : It took 16 years to produce something which is useful?
> : And this is after it took 10+ years to get to the `83
> : product?
>
> To be fair, a lot of that time Ada vendors, proponents, etc,
> were counting on the government to push things forward.
>
> Now, it is Ada activists pushing things forward with
> "real stuff".

These kind of observations are simply guesses that have nothing
to do with the reality of the situation. It is amazing to me how
on CLA people who know very little about the actual history
make wild guesses and post them as fact.

For those who were around during both the Ada 83 and Ada 95
processes, it is quite clear that

(a) the standardization process for both Ada 83 and Ada 95
went remarkably fast, certainly considering what has been
achieved for other languages.

(b) what delays there were resulted from fundamental technical
problems and technical differences of opinion in how they
should be resolved.

It should be said that the fact that the language design effort
was very well funded by the DoD in both cases was a crucial
factor in the rapid pace that was achieved.

Robert Dewar


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Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Roger Espel Llima]

In article <7jro57$nti$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
Robert Dewar  <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:

>Note that by comparison, Java standardization has just moved
>back to square one, with no progress at all, given Sun's
>decision that they cannot work with ISO. It may be a long long
>wait before Java has an international standard.

or maybe an int64_t wait.

uh, never mind.

-- 
Roger Espel Llima, espel@llaic.u-clermont1.fr
http://www.eleves.ens.fr:8080/home/espel/index.html

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[mjsilva]

In article <19990610.7A689D8.FF4B@mojaveg.ridgecrest.ca.us>,
  mojaveg@ridgecrest.ca.us (Everett M. Greene) wrote:
>
> It took 16 years to produce something which is useful?

Wrong.
>
> And this is after it took 10+ years to get to the `83
> product?

Wrong.
>
> To say that this speed is glacial is an insult to glaciers.
>
Clever, but wrong.

Thanks for asking, though.

Mike


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Re: Something doesn't compute here (was Re: How many different processors do you use?)

[Aidan Skinner]

On Wed, 9 Jun 1999 12:29:07 -0400, Jim Prince <tools2@gate.net> wrote:

>Correction: ' you don't get what you don't pay for'
>Just my 2 cents.

Hmmmm... having not ukp2 for my operating system and nothing for my
compiler, and being very happy with both I'm not sure that this holds.

- Aidan (you get what you don't pay for?)
-- 
http://www.skinner.demon.co.uk/aidan/
Horses for courses, tac-nukes to be sure.

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[markh]

Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
: In article <ugnqj7.8e.ln@bigbird.sw.asiainfo.com>,
:   markh@usai.asiainfo.com wrote:
:> Everett M. Greene <mojaveg@ridgecrest.ca.us> wrote:
:> (talking about Ada)
:> : It took 16 years to produce something which is useful?
:> : And this is after it took 10+ years to get to the `83
:> : product?
:>
:> To be fair, a lot of that time Ada vendors, proponents, etc,
:> were counting on the government to push things forward.
:>
:> Now, it is Ada activists pushing things forward with
:> "real stuff".

: These kind of observations are simply guesses that have nothing
: to do with the reality of the situation. It is amazing to me how
: on CLA people who know very little about the actual history
: make wild guesses and post them as fact.

I'm recounting my actual history of working at Applied
Data Research from 1984-1988.  ADR had a large Federal
division, and we did a lot of work with other vendors
selling to the U.S. Government.

Some of that work was with vendors proposing Ada solutions,
and vendors selling Ada products.  There seemed to be
the common feeling among these vendors that they would
not need to have competetive pricing, since their
products would be required for vendors bidding on
government contracts.

So, a vendor which was charging $2000 per seat (list
price) for a C compiler was at the same time charging
$10,000 per seat for the equivalent Ada system.
You could argue that the Ada system did 5 times more
than the C system, but the impression I got was that
they charged more simply because they felt they could,
and that other vendors would pay since they would
consider it as a necessary cost of doing business
with the government.

I don't deny that there were enthusiastic Ada people around at the time,
it's just there were enough people waiting around for the government gravy
train (via "the mandate") that other languages were able to surpass it
at that time.  Now, things seem to be very much improved.

ObjGnu:  ADR received the very first patent granted
for software.

My philosophical observation:  people depending on a
particular mandate to carry their views forward often
work less hard than other people.  Certain individuals
(such as yourself) excepted, of course.

Cordially,
Mark.

-- 
Mark Harrison                       "Open the floppy disk door, Hal."
AsiaInfo Computer Networks          http://usai.asiainfo.com:8080/
Beijing, China / Santa Clara, CA    markh@usai.asiainfo.com

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Everett M. Greene]

In article <7ju2k6$d2r$1@nnrp1.deja.com> mjsilva@my-deja.com writes:
> In article <19990610.7A689D8.FF4B@mojaveg.ridgecrest.ca.us>,
>   mojaveg@ridgecrest.ca.us (Everett M. Greene) wrote:

> > It took 16 years to produce something which is useful?
> Wrong.

1995 - 1983 = 12.  So my math ain't so good.

> > And this is after it took 10+ years to get to the `83
> > product?
> Wrong.

What became known as Ada was in process prior to 1975.
10 is a quite good approximation to the number of years
from inception to the first standard (if not first product).
The first estimates were that the initial compiler(s)
would be available by the end of 1975.

> > To say that this speed is glacial is an insult to glaciers.
> >
> Clever, but wrong.
> 
> Thanks for asking, though.

Nothing was asked.

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Eric Roesinger]

Followups trimmed in an effort to excise this language war 
from comp.arch.embedded... (*ducking*)

rawcswi@my-deja.com wrote in <7jot4k$o2s$1@nnrp1.deja.com>:
> In article <7jon3l$ldg$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> > In article <7jol96$kji$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
> >   rawcswi@my-deja.com wrote:
> > > In fairness to muddy_buddy, there is a vague connection to
> > > reality--
> > > the Reagan administration did have an effect on funding for
> > > academic research, for example.  And he was talking about the
> > > interpretation of Reagan's policies by those who were (in his
> > > view) responsible for promoting or not promoting Ada.  If the
> > > government during the early 80's had dropped a lot of money
> > > into promoting Ada use in universities, many of them would
> > > have
> > > started to use it (it supplied a standardized language with
> > > concurrency, exceptions and other things that the more common
> > > teaching language Pascal didn't offer) and Ada might be more
> > > popular today (popular as it may be in some areas, I haven't
> > > seen
> > > much use for my modest knowledge of Ada except to speed
> > > learning of Oracle PL/SQL).
> >
> > But this simply does not reflect reality.
> 
> What doesn't reflect reality?  You seem to have agreed with all
> the individual statements above.  How can you know how much
> the tastes of program managers at NSF or ARPA were influenced
> by the political climate of the time?  Without certainty on that issue,
> you can't say whether the Reagan administration's policies alone
> had a positive or negative effect on promoting Ada within universities,
> and I think that's enough to support a vague connection to reality.
> (On the whole, I don't agree with muddy_buddy's claim, but I think
> there's enough to justify requesting the additional information you
> give below.)
> 
> > Yes, it is true that
> > the NSF was reluctant to support Ada research in universities,
> > but as anyone around at the time knows, that had NOTHING AT ALL
> > to do with the Reagen administration, it was simply a reflection
> > of tastes of the program managers at NSF. ARPA was also not
> > particularly enthusiastic about Ada support, again, not lack of
> > resources, but lack of interest on the part of the program
> > managers. I visited ARPA a number of times to lobby for support
> > for a freely available Ada compiler, but without success. Note
> > that it was a HECK of a fight to make the Ada/Ed sources freely
> > available, but again that had NOTHING AT ALL to do with the
> > Reagen administration.
> 
> Well, the Reagan administration did have a substantial impact on
> academic research funding; but I would have been surprised if
> that had included military related research funding.  And if there
> was reluctance to put the funding that did exist into Ada, then
> the existence of additional funding might not have made much
> difference.  But your comments above do support a claim that
> the government failed to promote Ada adequately, outside of
> universities, if even ARPA and NSF weren't enthusiastic about it.
> 
> > (it is easy to see how conspiracy theories get started :-)
> 
> A good conspiracy theory thrives on a vague connection to
> reality; no connection or a firm connection would probably kill it.
> 
> > > But the Reagan administration also put a lot of money into the
> > > military, which must have included Ada (what were they
> > > planning to program the Strategic Defense Initiative in?)
> >
> > Yes, and the DoD via the AJPO actually provided substantial
> > funds to encourage the use of Ada in universities. I doubt
> > in fact that lack of money was a real issue. It is generally
> > rather difficult to get funds for supporting development of
> > new courses in universities, but it was relatively easy to
> > do so for development of Ada related courses, and indeed Ada
> > had and continues to have some success as a language used to
> > teach computing in universities.
> 
> I was a graduate student in CS through 1985; Ada was a prime
> example for courses because it had a lot of interesting features,
> but no compiler was available in our department at that time.
> Would more money have made a free compiler available?  Would it
> have made the department more inclined to commit to Ada as a
> future teaching language when compilers would become available?
> Maybe.  Your comments seem to indicate that the vision and will
> to pursue such a strategy to promote Ada was more lacking than
> the funding.
> 
> > > and my impression
> > > of the history of GNAT is that the government funded the
> > > initia GPLed Ada compiler (GNAT or the GNAT precursor?), as a
> > > conscious choice to make an Ada compiler freely available.
> >
> > Well I guess that does show that you were not intimately
> > involved with the details of the history here if that is
> > only an "impression". Yes, indeed, the GNAT project was funded
> > (at about the 3 million dollar level over four years) by the
> > DoD.
> 
> I don't believe I claimed to have any involvement.  (And there are
> still aspects of Ada history that are hard to obtain information about
> if you weren't involved (for example, details of the non-Green
> languages), despite the impressive web resources for Ada.)
> 
> > > Is
> > > this an accurate
> > > understanding of the lobbying and support from Chris Anderson
> > > you refer to?
> >
> > Chris Anderson, as Ada 9X Project Director, was the contract
> > administrator for this contract. She found the funding, and she
> > was the one who pushed the contract through, and also provided
> > us support at all levels (in particular, she also fought to
> > defend the project against very fierce attacks from some of the
> > commercial Ada vendors who tried to have the project killed).
> >
> > I think there is no question that a GNAT-like product for Ada 83
> > would have been a big help. It did not happen for many reasons,
> > none of which are even vaguely related to the Reagen
> > administration (goodness, next you will be blaming the
> > man for the common cold :-)
> 
> (Not to pursue conspiracy theories too far, but the Reagan
> administration's plan to compromise school lunch nutrition
> by declaring ketchup a vegetable might have made colds
> more common; his administration certainly pursued some policies
> that had a negative impact on public health in general.)
> 
> Any federal spending or non-spending during the 80s must have
> had some _vague_ relationship to the Reagan administration
> (which would have had to, at some high level, approve such
> spending).  But it is clear from your comments that the funding
> available to promote Ada was not the major issue, and another
> administration with less interest in military spending might have
> been worse for Ada.
> 

-- 
Eric G. Roesinger, Member Technical Staff ====== roesingere@indy.tce.com
INH620 Communications Product Development ====== =======================
PO Box 6139--Thomson Consumer Electronics ====== ==== 317  587-6431 ====
Indianapolis, IN 46206-6139 USA           ====== ==== FAX  587-6431 ====


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Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Lew Pitcher]

Could not the "Defense Contractor" billing mindset also figure into this?
Since Ada was/is the required language for DOD work, it might suffer from
the same inflationary pricing that introduced multi-hundred dollar toilet seats
to the DOD.

On Fri, 25 Jun 1999 14:14:29 GMT, Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:

>In article <ouf0k7.oe.ln@bigbird.sw.asiainfo.com>,
>  markh@usai.asiainfo.com wrote:
>> So, a vendor which was charging $2000 per seat (list
>> price) for a C compiler was at the same time charging
>> $10,000 per seat for the equivalent Ada system.
>> You could argue that the Ada system did 5 times more
>> than the C system, but the impression I got was that
>> they charged more simply because they felt they could,
>> and that other vendors would pay since they would
>> consider it as a necessary cost of doing business
>> with the government.
>
>Much more likely was that the market for C was much greater
>than the market for Ada. That clearly gets reflected in the
>price. There are often also considerably different levels of
>support involved.
>
>Think about televisions, I can buy a very nice 25" television
>for $250 these days, but if I want a monitor of similar size
>for a computer, they cost a lot more. Better quality? Well
>that's part of it, but mostly there are far more 25" television
>sets in the world than large screen computer monitors.
>
>In the case of software the manufacturing cost is very low,
>so everything comes down to volume and support requirements.
>
>There is also the general issue of trying to guess the
>elasticity of the market. Some Ada vendors tried the low cost
>product approach, but in Ada 83 days at least, this was not
>very successful.
>
>
>Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
>Share what you know. Learn what you don't.


Lew Pitcher
System Consultant, Integration Solutions Architecture
Toronto Dominion Bank

(pitchl@tdbank.ca)


(Opinions expressed are my own, not my employer's.)

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <ouf0k7.oe.ln@bigbird.sw.asiainfo.com>,
  markh@usai.asiainfo.com wrote:
> So, a vendor which was charging $2000 per seat (list
> price) for a C compiler was at the same time charging
> $10,000 per seat for the equivalent Ada system.
> You could argue that the Ada system did 5 times more
> than the C system, but the impression I got was that
> they charged more simply because they felt they could,
> and that other vendors would pay since they would
> consider it as a necessary cost of doing business
> with the government.

Much more likely was that the market for C was much greater
than the market for Ada. That clearly gets reflected in the
price. There are often also considerably different levels of
support involved.

Think about televisions, I can buy a very nice 25" television
for $250 these days, but if I want a monitor of similar size
for a computer, they cost a lot more. Better quality? Well
that's part of it, but mostly there are far more 25" television
sets in the world than large screen computer monitors.

In the case of software the manufacturing cost is very low,
so everything comes down to volume and support requirements.

There is also the general issue of trying to guess the
elasticity of the market. Some Ada vendors tried the low cost
product approach, but in Ada 83 days at least, this was not
very successful.


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Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <19990614.79AB570.86B3@mojaveg.ridgecrest.ca.us>,
  mojaveg@ridgecrest.ca.us (Everett M. Greene) wrote:
> > > And this is after it took 10+ years to get to the `83
> > > product?
> > Wrong.
>
> What became known as Ada was in process prior to 1975.
> 10 is a quite good approximation to the number of years
> from inception to the first standard (if not first product).
> The first estimates were that the initial compiler(s)
> would be available by the end of 1975.

I know of no such estimates. There might have been estimates
of this kind very early in the process, but the language
design was not even vaguely complete by that time.

Again, the interesting thing here is your assumption that ten
years is a long time for language standardization. This just
isn't true. Look at other languages, and you will see that
the Ada process was actually amazingly fast.


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Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Everett M. Greene]

In article <7l0305$55h$1@nnrp1.deja.com> Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> writes:
> In article <19990614.79AB570.86B3@mojaveg.ridgecrest.ca.us>,
>   mojaveg@ridgecrest.ca.us (Everett M. Greene) wrote:
> > > > And this is after it took 10+ years to get to the `83
> > > > product?
> > > Wrong.
> >
> > What became known as Ada was in process prior to 1975.
> > 10 is a quite good approximation to the number of years
> > from inception to the first standard (if not first product).
> > The first estimates were that the initial compiler(s)
> > would be available by the end of 1975.
> 
> I know of no such estimates. There might have been estimates
> of this kind very early in the process, but the language
> design was not even vaguely complete by that time.
> 
> Again, the interesting thing here is your assumption that ten
> years is a long time for language standardization. This just
> isn't true. Look at other languages, and you will see that
> the Ada process was actually amazingly fast.

Ten years is not at all uncommon for ANSI standards which by
ANSI requirement are consensus standards of existing practice.
It sometimes takes many years to obtain agreement among
competing practictioners.  In the case of Ada, DoD made a
flat statement that their definition was the standard.
Consensus existed by decree.

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <37739338.761297047@news.bellglobal.com>,
  pitchl@tdbank.ca wrote:
> Could not the "Defense Contractor" billing mindset also figure
into this?
> Since Ada was/is the required language for DOD work, it might
suffer from
> the same inflationary pricing that introduced multi-hundred
dollar toilet seats
> to the DOD.

No ...


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Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <37739338.761297047@news.bellglobal.com>,
  pitchl@tdbank.ca wrote:
> Could not the "Defense Contractor" billing mindset also figure
into this?
> Since Ada was/is the required language for DOD work, it might
suffer from
> the same inflationary pricing that introduced multi-hundred
dollar toilet seats
> to the DOD.

No ...


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Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Robert Dewar]

In article <19990626.7A2D4E8.143E4@mojaveg.ridgecrest.ca.us>,
  mojaveg@ridgecrest.ca.us (Everett M. Greene) wrote:
> In the case of Ada, DoD made a
> flat statement that their definition was the standard.
> Consensus existed by decree.

Complete nonsense. Obviously you were not involved in the
process, and are making uninformed guesses that do not
have even a vague relationship with reality!

In fact both Ada 83 and Ada 95 were very much consensus
operations, although some would say that Jean Ichbiah
and Tucker Taft had the ultimate say in many critical
areas. Certainly the DoD did not dictate the definition,
and could not have done so (even if it had wanted to,
which it most emphatically did NOT want to). And as for
the idea that the ISO WG9 committee is somehow subject
to DoD decrees that's good for a real laugh.

One thing that the DoD *did* emphatically want was that Ada
would become both a national and international standard. They
realized up front (unlike Sun) that this meant that the final
shape of the language would have to be determined by national
and international consensus and they welcomed this process.

I am always amazed by the amount of nonsense attempts there
are to rewrite history by people who were not around and
simply don't know what happened!

None of this is secret, it was a very open process, much has
been written about it, and many of the participants in
comp.lang.ada at least *were* around and know perfectly well
what really happened :-)

Robert Dewar


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Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Marin David Condic]

Lew Pitcher wrote:
> 
> Could not the "Defense Contractor" billing mindset also figure into this?
> Since Ada was/is the required language for DOD work, it might suffer from
> the same inflationary pricing that introduced multi-hundred dollar toilet seats
> to the DOD.
> 

This is a bit of a myth. The legendary $400 hammers come not from
unscrupulous defense contractors, but rather as a consequence of the
DoD's own accounting rules. Say you contract with the DoD to deliver 25
M1 Abrahms tanks. In the contract will be certain things besides the
tanks themselves. Service manuals, test equipment, maintenance kits
(complete with hammers! :-) training, support, etc. A whole laundry list
of line items. Now, you have your developmental costs (engineering) and
your manufacturing costs. The hammer may have been manufactured or
purchased at a cost of $5.00, but the accounting rules say you have to
distribute that huge engineering cost across all of the deliverables. So
$5.00 in cost plus markup *plus* development cost for the whole package
equals $400. It makes for interesting TV with Mike Wallace on 60
Minutes, or for Senators to pontificate on in front of the cameras, but
it is a huge distortion of the truth, bordering on calumny.

Trust me. We in the defense contracting business are *not* driving
around in limos and sucking up gravy on $600 coffee pots and such. We
get squeezed every bit as hard as our commercial counterparts -
sometimes even harder because we have one and only one customer who, if
he doesn't like the price and takes a hike, we're out of work.

MDC
-- 
Marin David Condic
Real Time & Embedded Systems, Propulsion Systems Analysis
United Technologies, Pratt & Whitney, Large Military Engines
M/S 731-95, P.O.B. 109600, West Palm Beach, FL, 33410-9600
***To reply, remove "bogon" from the domain name.***

Visit my web page at: http://www.mcondic.com/

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Marin David Condic]

Robert Dewar wrote:
> 
> In article <37739338.761297047@news.bellglobal.com>,
>   pitchl@tdbank.ca wrote:
> > Could not the "Defense Contractor" billing mindset also figure
> into this?
> > Since Ada was/is the required language for DOD work, it might
> suffer from
> > the same inflationary pricing that introduced multi-hundred
> dollar toilet seats
> > to the DOD.
> 
> No ...
> 

Wellll..... I'm basically with you, but there is this caveat: The DoD
buys lots of stuff that is highly customized, really low production run
- maybe even one of a kind. In that kind of market, you expect to pay
through the nose to get it. In some ways Ada started out in that
position. It was a custom designed language with an immediate market of
defense contractors who couldn't wriggle out of The Mandate. That wasn't
a lot of people, so it was a custom built, short production run product.
Somebody was going to pay for all that engineering and it can't be the
vendor. Obviously, nobody became the "Bill Gates Of Ada Compilers" so it
doesn't look like anybody was bilking the government out of millions -
it must have been pretty close to the bone.

MDC
-- 
Marin David Condic
Real Time & Embedded Systems, Propulsion Systems Analysis
United Technologies, Pratt & Whitney, Large Military Engines
M/S 731-95, P.O.B. 109600, West Palm Beach, FL, 33410-9600
***To reply, remove "bogon" from the domain name.***

Visit my web page at: http://www.mcondic.com/

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Marin David Condic]

Michael A. Covington wrote:
> I'm glad to see somebody point this out.  I had always figured that the
> "$400 hammer" was due to someone mixing up the development costs with the
> unit costs.

Well, there are those who get their political opinions from Hollywood
movie stars and are inclined to "Despise The Military" for no other
reason than that they *are* the military. Such individuals are often
disinclined to inquire about the actual facts or to bother to understand
the process that lead to these facts. So "$400 hammers" support their
bigotry towards the military and that's all the further the
investigation goes.

Sorry - I've drifted off topic again! I guess if you're in the business,
you get a little touchy when the knee-jerk accusations of thievery get
started and you know this is not the case.

MDC
-- 
Marin David Condic
Real Time & Embedded Systems, Propulsion Systems Analysis
United Technologies, Pratt & Whitney, Large Military Engines
M/S 731-95, P.O.B. 109600, West Palm Beach, FL, 33410-9600
***To reply, remove "bogon" from the domain name.***

Visit my web page at: http://www.mcondic.com/

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Michael A. Covington]

| > Could not the "Defense Contractor" billing mindset also figure into
this?
| > Since Ada was/is the required language for DOD work, it might suffer
from
| > the same inflationary pricing that introduced multi-hundred dollar
toilet seats
| > to the DOD.
|
| This is a bit of a myth. The legendary $400 hammers come not from
| unscrupulous defense contractors, but rather as a consequence of the
| DoD's own accounting rules.

I'm glad to see somebody point this out.  I had always figured that the
"$400 hammer" was due to someone mixing up the development costs with the
unit costs.

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Dan Nagle]

Hello,

Marin David Condic wrote:
> 
<snip requoted discussion>

> 
> Wellll..... I'm basically with you, but there is this caveat: The DoD
> buys lots of stuff that is highly customized, really low production run
> - maybe even one of a kind.

Agreed.  Of course, there are other factors as well.

If you want your ballpoint pen to work under any conditions,
from underwater to tropical desert to Antartica in winter,
because lives depend on the message absolutely being written,
it's going to be more expensive than what's on sale
at the office supply superstore.

The last 1% of "everywhere" might add 100x to the cost.

<snip rest and sig>

-- 

Cheers!
Dan Nagle		dnagle@erols.com
Purple Sage Computing Solutions, Inc.

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Richard Kettlewell]

(Followups set, feel free to override if appropriate.)

"Michael A. Covington" <covington@mindspring.com> writes:

> Touche'.  Wasn't it Orwell who said that if you don't believe in
> defense, you should try living in a country that doesn't have any?

Are there any?  Is it actually possible to perform the experiment in
question?

-- 
http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Michael A. Covington]

Marin David Condic <condicma@bogon.pwfl.com> wrote in message
news:37778F68.D88A8FEA@pwfl.com...
| Michael A. Covington wrote:
| > I'm glad to see somebody point this out.  I had always figured that the
| > "$400 hammer" was due to someone mixing up the development costs with
the
| > unit costs.
|
| Well, there are those who get their political opinions from Hollywood
| movie stars and are inclined to "Despise The Military" for no other
| reason than that they *are* the military.

Touche'.  Wasn't it Orwell who said that if you don't believe in defense,
you should try living in a country that doesn't have any?

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Robert I. Eachus]

Richard Kettlewell wrote:
> 
> "Michael A. Covington" <covington@mindspring.com> writes:
> 
> > Touche'.  Wasn't it Orwell who said that if you don't believe in
> > defense, you should try living in a country that doesn't have any?
> 
> Are there any?  Is it actually possible to perform the experiment in
> question?
 
   Good question, but the answer is surprising.  Costa Rica abolished
the army some years ago, because the government realized that the
largest threat was military coupes.  However, the US has provided a
fairly effective shield which makes the experiment work.  (For example,
we sent troops to Costa Rica when guerillas from Nicaragua were a
problem.)

   In addition, several small countries have no military forces.  But
almost all of these, such as Monaco and Lichtenstein, have "mutual
defense" treaties with larger neighbors.  For example, no country could
attack the Republic of San Marino without passing through Italy (other
than Italy of course).  So RSM pays Italy for providing defense, rich
Italians move there for the lower taxes and everyone is happy.  (The
deal with the Vatican is similar, but the Vatican has an army--the Swiss
Guards.)

   However, almost all these countries, other than Costa Rica, delegate
all control over foreign affairs to the much bigger neighbor.

-- 

                                        Robert I. Eachus

with Standard_Disclaimer;
use  Standard_Disclaimer;
function Message (Text: in Clever_Ideas) return Better_Ideas is...

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Stefan Skoglund]

Robert I. Eachus wrote:
>    Good question, but the answer is surprising.  Costa Rica abolished
> the army some years ago, because the government realized that the
> largest threat was military coupes.  However, the US has provided a
> fairly effective shield which makes the experiment work.  (For example,
> we sent troops to Costa Rica when guerillas from Nicaragua were a
> problem.)
> 

Hmm, some countries would have needed a far bigger army due to the
big neighbour.

Re: How many different processors do you use?

[no-one]

>> largest threat was military coupes.
                      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Dodge Vipers with splotchy paintwork? Hummers with soft tops?
Military coupes indeed. Little deuce coup detat?