Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!uwvax!rang From: rang@cs.wisc.edu (Anton Rang) Newsgroups: comp.sw.components Subject: Re: Are "production" programming languages are dinosaurs? Message-ID:Date: 3 Oct 89 15:55:34 GMT References: <929@scaup.cl.cam.ac.uk> <30@venice.SEDD.TRW.COM> Sender: news@spool.cs.wisc.edu Organization: UW-Madison CS department Lines: 45 In-reply-to: baur@venice.SEDD.TRW.COM's message of 3 Oct 89 10:23:26 GMT In article <30@venice.SEDD.TRW.COM> baur@venice.SEDD.TRW.COM (Steven L. Baur) writes: >in article <929@scaup.cl.cam.ac.uk>, scc@cl.cam.ac.uk (Stephen Crawley) says: >> Posted: Fri Sep 29 13:41:17 1989 >> >> Well how come ADA seems to be largely irrelevant outside of the defense >> sector? > >It is not really. But current Ada compiler technology produces large slow >code. Well, I'm not an Ada person, but current Ada compiler technology does *not* produce large, slow code. I used to use the Telesoft VAX/VMS Ada compiler; even without global optimization, it produced code comparable to the other VMS compilers (which are all fairly mature and produce excellent code). I haven't used many other Ada compilers, but VAX Ada also appears to do a pretty good job of code generation. > Given mature languages like "C", there should not be much incentive >currently, to use Ada. C is mature? There isn't even a standard for it yet! Besides, it is missing a LOT of features very useful for large projects: nested packages, information hiding, etc. It doesn't even have nesting in the namespace (writing two functions called "sort_array" generally leads to trouble). > [ a few experiences with Ada use deleted ] >The Heterogeneous IPC effort was an order of magnitude more difficult to >implement in Ada than in "C". Is this because of the language itself, or because it requires a different programming methodology? The learning curve for Ada is pretty steep, and I suspect that it's even worse for managers of large projects. Did the managers and programmers have experience with both Ada and C before the project was started? I'm not saying that Ada is universally better than (or even as good as) C, but I've run into a lot of cases where using C was a big headache (usually due to the lack of nested procedures/modules). +----------------------------------+------------------+ | Anton Rang (grad student) | rang@cs.wisc.edu | | University of Wisconsin--Madison | | +----------------------------------+------------------+