NetNews Offline 2/NetNews Offline Volume 2.iso/news/comp/lang/c++-part1/9440

Internet Message Format | 1996-08-05 | 1.7 KB

Path: camelot.dsccc.com!not-for-mail
From: [e-mail] (Kevin Cline)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: C/C++ knocks the crap out of Ada
Date: 1 Mar 1996 12:39:54 -0600
Organization: DSC Communications Corporation Switch Products Division
Message-ID: <4h7g9q$[e-mail]>
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <4h4j31$[e-mail]> <dewar.825640041@schonberg>
NNTP-Posting-Host: sun152.spd.dsccc.com

In article <dewar.825640041@schonberg>, Robert Dewar <[e-mail]> wrote:
>(a) this reveals quite a lack of knowledge of Ada, which had a standard
>*before* anyone started using it, and to which all compilers conformed
>faithfully.
>

This point has been made over and over again, but the Ada advocates seldom
mention that the Ada virtual machine was not powerful enough to make it
possible to write portable Ada programs that had significant interaction
with the external environment; as late as 1988 there still were no standard
Ada API's for the most important UNIX system facilities: X windows,
MOTIF, the POSIX interface.  Actually, standards were in the process of
being defined, but were not widely supported by compiler vendors.
To make matters worse, the pragmas required to call external C code
varied between compiler vendors as well.  The result was that Ada programs
that needed to use operating system functions were not portable between
Ada compilers, and the porting effort was significantly more difficult
that porting C programs, even in the absence of a C language standard.
I believe this was a major factor in the market rejection of Ada for
ordinary commercial software development.

--
Kevin Cline