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>
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Organization: UW-Madison CS department
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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 |                  |
+----------------------------------+------------------+