In article <1683@meaddata.meaddata.com>, gordon@meaddata.com (Gordon
Edwards) writes:
|>
|> Trivia:
|> The company I used to work for was one of the four finalists in the Ada
|> competition (blue proposal) and still performs USAF compiler validations.
|>
|> Can anyone guess the company?  (Its in any Ada book.)
|>

That's easy: SofTech, Inc.  I used to work there too.  In fact, I was
responsible for writing a significant number of tests in the ACVC (Ada
Compiler Validation Capability) test suite and performed numerous Ada
validations for vendors.  I was also a programmer in the development of
a large electronic warfare simulation system which was being written in
Ada with object-oriented techniques.  I now use C++ for text processing
applications.

Enough about my credentials.  IMHO, the Ada language itself FAR exceeds
the C++ language in almost every respect.  The one exception, inheritance,
can be convincingly argued to be of limited practical value (James Coggins,
a C++ expert at UNC-Chapel Hill has some good "sermons" about this), and
is more than outweighed by Ada's support for genericity (package/class
and procedure templates), exception handling, standardization/portability,
and general support for sound software engineering practices.  You can do
all the bit-twiddling you want in Ada, and IT COULD STILL BE PORTABLE!
Besides, it's my understanding that Ada 9X (the next Ada standard, for
which the Requirements Document is due out in December and the Reference
Manual in June 1991) will have inheritance, long before C++ "inherits"
exception handling and genericity.

For some reason, people get the idea that because Ada was developed and
funded by the "American Military Establishment", it is unusable
commercially.  It gets dismissed out-of-hand, as though it had built-in
commands for firing missiles, dropping bombs, etc. and nothing else.  No
consideration is given to the fact that the Ada LRM is not only a
military standard but also an ANSI and ISO standard, and that gigabucks
and hundreds of PhD's went into the careful process of putting it together.
Ada is not a hacked preprocessor on a hacked language.

Don't get me wrong.  I love C++.  It's FUN!  It doesn't cramp my style the
way Ada sometimes does.  I don't have to put up with long compile times,
large executables, etc.  That doesn't have anything to do with the
language itself, however, and it's already been said that various compilers
do these better than others.  Whoever inherits (ahem!) my code will probably
want to shoot me, but what the heck?  Productivity, not maintainability,
is the C/C++ standard.


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     John Townsend                 Internet:   johnt@meaddata.com
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