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- Path: camelot.dsccc.com!kcline
- From: kcline@sun132.spd.dsccc.com (Kevin Cline)
- Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++,comp.edu
- Subject: Re: C/C++ knocks the crap out of Ada
- Date: 28 Mar 1996 16:27:13 GMT
- Organization: DSC Communications Corporation Switch Products Division
- Message-ID: <4jeel1$erh@tpd.dsccc.com>
- References: <JSA.96Feb16135027@organon.com> <4iupk7$5t4@tpd.dsccc.com> <JSA.96Mar25205417@organon.com> <31582A63.4BE9@east.thomsoft.com>
- NNTP-Posting-Host: sun132.spd.dsccc.com
-
- In article <31582A63.4BE9@east.thomsoft.com>,
- Ed Falis <falis@east.thomsoft.com> wrote:
- >Jon S Anthony wrote:
- >>
- >> In article <4iupk7$5t4@tpd.dsccc.com> kcline@sun132.spd.dsccc.com (Kevin Cline) writes:
- >>
- >> > BTW, what architectures does ObjectAda support, and will ObjectAda
- >> > code compile largely unmodified with Gnat, and vice versa?
- >>
- >> A Thompson guy could better answer this. I would be surprised
- >> if Gnat and ObjectAda didn't compile things with little or no
- >> modification. Heck, I've taken large chuncks of VAX Ada and moved
- >> them to Gnat with no changes. Of course, these did not have any
- >> OS specific stuff in them.
- >>
- >
- >Well, I'll give it a shot. This year, it'll be Wintel, PowerPC/Win NT,
- >Sun/Solaris, HP-UX and (I believe) PowerPC/AIX. We also expect Wintel
- >cross to 32 bit X86 this year. Various PowerPC and 68K cross early next
- >year.
- >
-
- Well, that means that today's ObjectAda would not solve
- my 1993 problem: writing a Motif application for SunOS 4.1.3,
- Solaris, and SGI IRIX.
-
- Some of you may be asking "Why did you use Ada given all these problems?"
- I used it because my DoD customer wanted me to.
-
- >My experience so far is that the ability to cross compile code developed
- >on GNAT or ObjectAda is pretty good - the main issues are in a couple of
- >areas: ... availability of identical bindings
-
- This problem alone is enough to disqualify Ada for development
- of medium-sized UNIX applications. Admittedly, until POSIX all
- UNIX systems appeared to be slightly different, even to C/C++
- applications, but the differences were relatively minor, well known,
- and easily worked around. Different Ada bindings tend to (say) UNIX
- tend to be radically different and much more work is required to
- translate from one binding to another.
- --
- Kevin Cline
-