> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Rich Kulawiec
> Sent: Thursday, October 22, 1998 7:30 AM
> (Java and C++) were not designed by committee, which is why much of
> the bulk of Ada is excess, useless, cumbersome baggage,
I share your dislike of the work of committees, but Ada was NOT
designed that way! Why do you think that it was? True, the
requirements spec -- the Strawman .. Tinman .. Steelman series --
was created by committee, but the language design was done
by Jean Ichbiah of Honeywell, a very smart and very strong-
minded person. He was quite willing to de-emphasize or even
ignore bad requirements from the spec. The redesign from
Ada 83 to Ada 95 was done by Tucker Taft of Intermetrics,
also brilliant and possessed of strong opinions.
> I don't buy the Ada "validation" process for a moment. It's
> bureaucratese with no significant software engineering value.
I have to assume that you don't know much about the validation
suite or process. It consists of some 2,000 discrete tests of
Ada syntax and semantics, and there's nothing bureaucratic about
it. Code that compiles and runs correctly on one validated
compiler for a target machine is extremely likely to compile
and run without changes on another validated compiler for a
different target machine. In fact, it's so likely that the
few failures are widely reported and discussed.
> There's a reason you don't see the people who have a choice (i.e. the
> freeware community) rushing to port Ada and write things in Ada
Well, the GNU people at NYU did port Ada to the JVM and do give
away the whole development suite (GNAT) as freeware, but I don't
know if they "rushed" in any sense. Since the DoD Mandate of Ada
was cancelled a number of years ago, and was never enforced with any
vigor, I'd say that everybody who writes in Ada does so by choice.
This includes air-traffic control systems in the US, Europe, and
Australia, Airbus and Boeing, the Swiss banking system, GPS, ESA,
CAD-CAM, medical systems, the ISS etc. The current estimated
annual investment in Ada development projects is $4 billion.
> ... C++ and Java (and C and Perl and tcl/tk). ...
> account for +95% of everything that comes out.
Does that make them better? Decisions about what programming
language to use are usually made by clueless management types
or by coders who don't know other languages and don't plan to
be around to maintain their programs five years later. Our
politicians are elected by popular vote, and look what we get.
> ... Is there something magic about Ada that means that those
> avionics systems are bug-free?
Yes. Not bug-free, but with significantly fewer bugs.
> I don't think so. I've never seen any credible evidence that programs
> written in Ada are demonstrably more reliable than programs written in
> any other modern language. It's just hype spouted by Ada proponents
How many of the studies have you seen? I've seen quite a few that
said exactly that, the latest a major study by Capers Jones, hardly
an Ada proponent. He showed Ada and Smalltalk to be at the highest
level, far above C++. There were not enough examples of large systems
in Java to rate it. (Does anyone really use Java for major systems?)
> ... I'd advise spending a lot more time worrying about the ancient
> software in the ATC systems which guide that Boeing 777,
I do; I was a Distinguished Reviewer of the ATC, old and new.
That's why all new ATC work is in Ada.
> ... or the software runnning CAT and NMR scanners, or ...
HP is, I believe, the largest developer of s/w for medical systems,
and they use Ada for them.
My apologies to the List for language flaming, but I do strongly believe
that anyone who wants to build a business on developing software for
the Web would greatly increase their productivity and reduce their long-
term risk by using Ada 95. There are two high-quality compilers and
development suites targeted to the Java Virtual Machine, one freeware
(GNAT) and one commercial (Intermetrics - $79) and a large number
of native compilers. This makes it possible to create a single source
code set that compiles to a JVM module for portability and to native
executables for much faster execution on specific processors.
Bob Munck
Mill Creek Systems LC
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