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- Path: keats.ugrad.cs.ubc.ca!not-for-mail
- From: c2a192@ugrad.cs.ubc.ca (Kazimir Kylheku)
- Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++
- Subject: Re: C/C++ knocks the crap out of Ada
- Date: 11 Mar 1996 16:13:02 -0800
- Organization: Computer Science, University of B.C., Vancouver, B.C., Canada
- Message-ID: <4i2fieINN2ds@keats.ugrad.cs.ubc.ca>
- References: <JSA.96Feb16135027@organon.com> <4hdt1tINN44i@keats.ugrad.cs.ubc.ca> <adaworksDnrrpt.pJ@netcom.com> <4hglsm$o5r@rational.rational.com>
- NNTP-Posting-Host: keats.ugrad.cs.ubc.ca
-
- In article <4hglsm$o5r@rational.rational.com>,
- Bob Kitzberger <rlk@nubuddy> wrote:
- >
- >Kazimir, here's a little bit of C trivia you may find interesting...
- >regarding the birth of Ada, and why C wasn't used instead for DoD :
- >
- > Other languages were considered for formal evaluation, but were
- > not included because preliminary examination led one to believe
- > that they would not meet the requirements so were not viable
- > candidates for the purposes of the DoD. One such language was C.
- > At that time DARPA was working with Western Electric/Bell Labs
- > on UNIX, contractually supporting some DARPA contractors and
- > other government facilities using UNIX. It was the evaluation
- > policy to have the owners provide assessments of their own
- > languages, in addition to the contracted evaluations, so HOLWG
- > took advantage of this connection between DARPA and Bell Labs
- >--> to request their cooperation. When Bell Labs were invited to
- >--> evaluate C against the DoD requirements, they said that there was
- >--> no chance of C meeting the requirements of readability, safety,
- >--> etc., for which we were striving, and that it should not even
- >--> be on the list of evaluated languages. We recognized the truth
- >--> in their observation and honored their request.
- >
- >Source: ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 28, Number 3, March 1993, page
- >314 (page 31 of Bill Whitaker's article)
-
- I just read most of that article. The above paragraph, as I suspected, refers
- to events that took place sometime around 1976 (the precise time is not clear).
- This was, of course, well before the standardization of the C language. This
- predates the publication of the Kernighan and Ritchie text which served as a
- guide to the ANSI commitee. Some of the DoD's requirements were truly bizarre,
- such as the need for fixed-point arithmetic and a very stringent input
- character set restriction---for the support of very old computing equipment
- still in use at that time. C clearly lacks sufficient abstraction to lend
- itself well to an implementation on equipment that differs too wildly from a
- PDP-11.
-
- The Whitaker article is an interesting first-hand account of the history of
- the development of Ada; I greatly recommend it!
- --
-
-