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From: RC <rc1@clanchy.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Success: Ada versus C
Date: 1997/06/04
Message-ID: <zdqyUFAeYYlzUw6H@clanchy.demon.co.uk>#1/1
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Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-06-04T00:00:00+00:00
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As I have been given to understand, C became popular by the back door by 
being given away as part of Unix which was itself sold for $1 to 
universities.  The commercial world then gained an unlimited supply of 
Unix fans who were C programmers, a powerful force towards commercial 
acceptance.

Commercial success has led to the development of C and Unix which are 
now very large oak trees in comparison to the little acorns they started 
as and I would suggest, much less affordable to students.

Ada started as a large, expensive project funded by a large, well funded 
end user.  There has been little reason for suppliers to introduce Ada 
as an inexpensive loss-leader.  The restriction that Ada compilers 
should all be fully compliant to a comprehensive specification is also a 
set-back for would be vendors.

Had Ada been around when C and Unix were developed, I'm sure it would 
have had a better head start.  Suppose Unix had been written in Ada and 
someone had subsequently tried to introduce C, it could only have been 
meant as a joke.

Fortran is still going strong although C is really a descendant from it 
which effectively has all of its good points and omits some (many?) of 
the bad.

By the time C has enough in the way of libraries and add ons to provide 
all of the functionality claimed for it there must be little difference 
in size between it and Ada.  There are some nasty little bad habits, 
inherent in the way C is specified which Ada attempts to improve on.  
Hopefully Ada won't die of its grandiose vision and C won't swamp it 
with its Bindweed like insistence.

RC1