home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- Path: nnrp.info.ucla.edu!jmartin
- From: jmartin@cs.ucla.edu (Jay Martin)
- Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++,comp.edu
- Subject: Re: C/C++ knocks the crap out of Ada
- Date: 2 Mar 1996 06:49:03 GMT
- Organization: University of California, Los Angeles
- Message-ID: <4h8r0v$1c4i@saba.info.ucla.edu>
- References: <JSA.96Feb16135027@organon.com> <4gvrffINNlqo@anvil.ugrad.cs.ubc.ca> <4h4j31$1ga3@watnews1.watson.ibm.com> <dewar.825640041@schonberg> <4h7g9q$bi3@sun152.spd.dsccc.com>
- NNTP-Posting-Host: may.cs.ucla.edu
- X-Newsreader: NN version 6.5.0.b3.0 #9 (NOV)
-
- kcline@sun152.spd.dsccc.com (Kevin Cline) writes:
-
- >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.
-
- And what languages have full and timely support under Unix? Basically
- one: C. Even C++ is not yet well supported. So basically I agree Ada
- sucks because it is not C. VMS supported in a timely manner a good
- sized set of languages with system call libraries, but the wonderful
- Unix does not. Thank the geniuses in (academic) computer science for
- deeming that only one operating system and computer langauge (Unix and
- C) are necessary. Having more than one just causes dissension and
- pain and since all languages are Turing equivalent it doesn't really
- matter anyway. Plus since software efficiencies between languages
- vary only by a constant factor we can use O() notation and to make
- them equal. The wonders and brilliance of Computer Science!
-
- Jay
-