From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Received: by 2002:a24:674f:: with SMTP id u76-v6mr7624643itc.36.1531071385925; Sun, 08 Jul 2018 10:36:25 -0700 (PDT) X-Received: by 2002:aca:eb15:: with SMTP id j21-v6mr4070917oih.6.1531071385717; Sun, 08 Jul 2018 10:36:25 -0700 (PDT) Path: eternal-september.org!reader01.eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!news.uzoreto.com!weretis.net!feeder6.news.weretis.net!feeder.usenetexpress.com!feeder-in1.iad1.usenetexpress.com!border1.nntp.dca1.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!d7-v6no5712403itj.0!news-out.google.com!l67-v6ni6057itl.0!nntp.google.com!g2-v6no2640508itf.0!postnews.google.com!glegroupsg2000goo.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2018 10:36:25 -0700 (PDT) In-Reply-To: <2f5399b4-518b-4a2e-9941-2ae267d51309@googlegroups.com> Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: glegroupsg2000goo.googlegroups.com; posting-host=47.185.195.62; posting-account=zwxLlwoAAAChLBU7oraRzNDnqQYkYbpo NNTP-Posting-Host: 47.185.195.62 References: <856189aa-fa00-4960-929e-174f352310ad@googlegroups.com> <2718c8d4-5f35-4fd8-a1aa-1e60069a7a5d@googlegroups.com> <39fce60c-9f56-42fb-b679-fa08810b00ee@googlegroups.com> <3701bf07-89a5-4cb0-a704-5aebb589ca79@googlegroups.com> <2f5e4ce0-94e8-4b94-9da7-045ec90a9b22@googlegroups.com> <9bb99fb4-b9c7-4516-97b5-da41466e96be@googlegroups.com> <1162d6bf-c226-4089-ae2e-870c7da9c80f@googlegroups.com> <2f5399b4-518b-4a2e-9941-2ae267d51309@googlegroups.com> User-Agent: G2/1.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 Message-ID: <1ab5db5c-7892-40a8-ae36-ca1ec1168768@googlegroups.com> Subject: Re: Teaching C/C++ from Ada perspective? From: "Dan'l Miller" Injection-Date: Sun, 08 Jul 2018 17:36:25 +0000 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Xref: reader02.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:53731 Date: 2018-07-08T10:36:25-07:00 List-Id: On Saturday, July 7, 2018 at 3:43:44 PM UTC-5, Maciej Sobczak wrote: > > The -man series is clearly language agnostic >=20 > If it's the set of requirements for the Ada language, then obviously it i= s not agnostic. >=20 > > because no less than 6 quite-different programming languages >=20 > Nope. All of them wanted to become Ada. By definition of =E2=80=98pre-disqualified=E2=80=99, the pre-disqualified T= artan and pre-disqualified -75+15PL/I did not want to become Ada. There was a 7th language derived from Ironman and Steelman. The CHILL lang= uage ISO/IEC 9496 and ITU-T Z.200 was the European telecom industry's incen= sed retort to being uninvited to the party. CHILL is a 3rd language that w= as designed with the overt knowledge that it would never be Ada. And unlik= e Tartan and -75+15PL/I, CHILL became an ITU-T, ISO, and IEC standard, last= revised in 1999, and part of GCC all the way through the GCC 2.X era. And= analogous to the Ada9X project, CHILL was revised during the first half of= the 1990s to be OO. And if you have ever made a telephone call in Europe = (and much of the rest of the world outside of North America or Japan), then= it is highly likely that CHILL's wise software engineering code made that = telephone call possible. 7 languages=E2=80=946 of which are =E2=80=A2very=E2=80=A2 not*-Ada=E2=80=94= overtly designed from scratch (CHILL, Ada, Red, Blue, Tartan) or modified (= -75+15PL/I, Yellow) don't clearly demonstrate the language agnosticity of I= ronman/Steelman, eh? 2 quite different languages (Ada versus CHILL) became= ISO/IEC language standards. CHILL (from Alcatel & Siemens) begat Erlang a= s a reaction from Ericsson; nearly all the not-Ada-esque/not-Algol-esque/no= t-C-esque portions of Erlang are directly mimicked from CHILL=E2=80=94and E= rlang is gaining popularity today. * CHILL looks more like PL/I and COBOL. > Nope. All of them wanted to become Ada. Btw, Maciej, I've got news for you. It was common knowledge among those of= us** advocating C++ in the latter half of the 1980s that C++ wanted to bec= ome the Ada-esque Ada killer as much as CHILL did. AT&T (North American te= lecom) and the European PTT equipment manufacturers felt quite spurned for = being uninvited to the language competition. That is a huge part of the re= ason that AT&T, Alcatel, and Siemens, (and Ericsson, counting Erlang) poure= d so much effort into designing C with Classes, C++, and CHILL, (and Erlang= ) instead of adopting Ada for their embedded systems. (Telecom equipment h= as always been the 2nd largest realtime embedded software footprint on the = planet behind the military.) If there is one single root-cause reason that= Ada failed to launch on the launchpad from, say, 1985 to 1993, it was this= spurned-detest of Ada in telecom, not because of what was in or not in Ada= , but because telecom was excluded from the selection process. ** I wrote my first C++ programs in 1988 on an Oregon compiler first and a = few months later when I first got my hands on a cfront from AT&T on a 3B2. By C++ and CHILL wanting to very much be the Ada-esque Ada killers from tel= ecom, C++ and CHILL wanted to be Ada even more than Red, Yellow, Blue, Tart= an, or -75+15PL/I did. Your logic is flawed and na=C3=AFve, =E2=80=A2as if= =E2=80=A2 you are unaware of all this history. (Is that that =E2=80=9Cas if=E2=80=9D rule that you were talking about?) > > C++ was in a legally-protected zoo of sorts, not subjected to this natu= ral selection >=20 > And this is where I object. The "natural selection" does not happen by co= mmittee. The closest industrial > analogy to "natural selection" is the tool market, where users are ultima= te judges. And this is the arena > where your historical and sentimental links are both impressive and usele= ss. > > Think about more recent programming languages, which do not have. For som= e reason most of them try > heavily to resemble C++, but you cannot blame AT&T for this any longer. N= ow it's somebody else's fault, > but this is how "natural selection" works. Wow. What an incredibly jaw-dropping disregard of history. It is =E2=80= =A2as if=E2=80=A2 you didn't live through the 1980s or something. It is = =E2=80=A2as if=E2=80=A2 you didn't live in the USA or something during the = cut-throat viciousness of The Unix Wars at the end of The Cold War, or some= thing. =E2=80=98The industrial commercial marketplace=E2=80=99 as some sor= t of paragon of pure-as-driven-snow Adam Smith unfettered capitalism didn't= decide in any way whatsoever. Government mandates in the USA's federal go= vernment decided by fiat. Allow me to explain how the my-fiat-is-bigger-th= an-your-fiat scheme worked: https://www.cbronline.com/news/posix_comes_up_to_starting_gate_as_the_vendo= r_independent_unix_standard https://gcn.com/Articles/1995/08/22/NT-is-Posixcompliant-GSBCA-decides-ruli= ng-raises-questions.aspx A sign that hung in many Bell-System facilities in 1983 read: =E2=80=9CThere are two giant entities at work in our country, and they both= have an amazing influence on our daily lives ... one has given us radar, s= onar, stereo, teletype, the transistor, hearing aids, artificial larynxes, = talking movies, and the telephone. The other has given us the Civil War, th= e Spanish=E2=80=93American War, the First World War, the Second World War, = the Korean War, the Vietnam War, double-digit inflation, double-digit unemp= loyment, the Great Depression, the gasoline crisis, and the Watergate fiasc= o. Guess which one is now trying to tell the other one how to run its busin= ess?=E2=80=9D Hence, given their hurt feelings, turn-about was viewed as fair play: AT&T was so incensed by the federal government's A) anti-AT&T activities in the 1956 breakup, B) the HOLWG spurning, C) the 1984 breakup, and D) perhaps a few other things (such as the 1968 perceived Carterfone abando= nment of Theodore Roosevelt's 1906 Universal Service mandate with AT&T's th= en-mantra =E2=80=9COne policy. One System. Universal Service.=E2=80=9D) that AT&T sought a form of swinging the pendulum the other way: the federa= l government was to mandate that only AT&T-influenced UNIX-esque computers = could be purchased for computer-room usage, putting DEC's VMS, IBM's mainfr= ames, Prime's PRIMOS, Honeywell's OSes including impressively-B2-Orange-Boo= k-compliant MULTICS, and so forth at drastic disadvantage or elimination wh= en selling to the USA's federal government=E2=80=94and AT&T-world at decisi= vely favorable advantage in the federal government's 20% of the USA's GDP. Because of the artificially-fomented POSIX/UNIX wars from approximately mid= -1980s to the mid-1990s, nearly everyone in the federal government obeyed t= he AT&T-biased POSIX mandate, and in turn nearly everyone wanted to develop= UNIX/POSIX software in the AT&T languages so that their software was as cl= ose in philosophy to AT&T's/UNIX's/POSIX's as possible. In effect: a) the GSA's procurement-requirements mandate-fiat for nearly-100% POSIX se= rver purchases by the 20% of the USA's GDP that is the federal government (= including DoD & DoE**) thoroughly eclipsed b) the DoD's mandate-fiat for nearly-100% Ada development in national-secur= ity contracts. It was a 2-way tug-of-war between NIST/DoCommerce versus Do= D/DoE. ** In effect the backers of C/C++/POSIX said: haha, DoD/DoE, even if you d= emand Ada as a thin veneer on top, we demand C/C++/POSIX products underneat= h at the operating system and computer-procurement level. Checkmate: form= er-pawn takes Queen Ada. In effect (and actually quite surprisingly!), AT&T-world's government-lobby= ing planet was bigger than DoD-world's government-lobbying planet in the c= ompetition of =E2=80=A2=E2=80=A2who was eclipsing whom=E2=80=A2=E2=80=A2, a= nd who was more capable in utilizing their lobbying levers of power within = the federal government to pull off the bigger more-impervious of the 2 comp= eting federal-government mandates-fiats with long tentacles that still have= harsh lingering overshadowing effects even today 30 years later. AT&T-wor= ld's influence over Commerce/NIST won in every lasting measurable way in th= e levers of power via government influence; DoD's mandate for Ada faded int= o history as it shriveled like a dying*** plant in permanent never-ending e= clipse from planet-POSIX/C/C++ for the federal-government's out-sized domin= ance of 20% of the USA's GDP. *** Fortunately, some people are keeping Ada alive today via UV-grow-lamps,= as C++ bakes in the scorching heat of being on the surface the POSIX/C/Uni= x planet that is still overshadowing us all. C++ wasn't =E2=80=A2designed= =E2=80=A2=E2=80=A1 for that kind of exposure, as witnessed by the severe-ta= r-&-feathering lambasting that C++ is currently getting over there=E2=80=A1= =E2=80=A1 at Slashdot: The ++ has been removed in the URL; don't let the URL fool you. https://developers.slashdot.org/story/18/07/07/0342201/is-c-a-really-terrib= le-language =E2=80=A1 C++ was accreted, not designed. =E2=80=A1=E2=80=A1 I promise that I had absolutely nothing to do with any o= f that over at Slashdot, other than the sole Anonymous-Coward reply that is= =E2=80=9DAda2012=E2=80=9D in response to someone's question of: other tha= n C++ what good language is there for embedded systems programming. > And, BTW, we were supposed to help the OP, who was asked to teach C++. Oh, we are helping him very very much. We are showing him in its full glor= y what a mess C++ is. Any good teacher of C++ looking at all the replies i= n this thread would say, =E2=80=9CGee, I really must help my students avoid= those morasses in C++.=E2=80=9D No one will ever know where the morasses = are via polly-anna loving praise of C++. No, the only way to know where th= e morasses in C++ are=E2=80=94the only way to know precisely where C++ buri= ed the bodies=E2=80=94is to examine its dirty laundry, clothing-item by clo= thing-item. Then, get one of the 9 varieties of Carbona out to remove just= that kind of stain from each portion of C++.