Newsgroups: comp.object
Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!caen!news.cs.indiana.edu!kitchel@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu
From: Sid Kitchel <kitchel@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu>
Subject: Re: ada-c++ productivity
Message-ID: <1991Mar21.115534.19521@news.cs.indiana.edu>
Organization: Computer Science, Indiana University
References: <1991Mar10.151220.2581@forwiss.uni-passau.de> <11966@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> <EACHUS.91Mar14190050@aries.mitre.org> <1991Mar15.224626.27077@aero.org> <jls.669170821@rutabaga> <12159@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> <jls.669525642@rutabaga>
Distribution: usa
Date: Thu, 21 Mar 91 11:55:23 -0500

jls@rutabaga.Rational.COM (Jim Showalter) writes:
|->People always get hung up on the mandate thing, but it is instructive
|->to consider WHY there is a mandate in the FIRST place. The reason?:
|->because the DoD determined that the tower of Babel of languages they
|->were suffering with (which included just oodles of C and FORTRAN) was
|->not doing the job. Ada is precisely the best language for the job because
|->all others were found--through empirical testing--to be woefully inadequate.

|->In short, C and FORTRAN and COBOL and LISP and Smalltalk-80 and all the
|->others had their chance, and blew it.

	Whoa!!! Let's interject a little programming language history here.
Smalltalk-80 prima facie should not be in your list because the problems arose
in the 60s and 70s. The languages that caused the most problems in the DOD's
Tower of Babel were the multitude of assembly languages used for speed and
compactness. (Way back in them dark ages, deployed computers were often
equipped with 32K or less of RAM.) To a lesser extent, languages such as
JOVIAL and CMS-2 were also causing problems.
	Most of us academic types (even when we are ex-military) doubt 
that Ada is the solution to the original problem or any problem.

						Former naval person,
						(reformed CMS-2 user and
						 OODBS developer)
						   --Sid
-- 
Sid Kitchel...............WARNING: allergic to smileys and hearts....
Computer Science Dept.                         kitchel@cs.indiana.edu
Indiana University                              kitchel@iubacs.BITNET
Bloomington, Indiana  47405-4101........................(812)855-9226
