Re: Why don't large companies use Ada?

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Not just EQUIVALENCE, but much more importantly in Fortran you can pass
a two dimensional array to a routine that treats it as a one dimensional
array, and also you can pass a single column (but not a single row) of
a two dimensional array as a one dimensional array. These features are
often used.

Since we have pragma convention in Ada 9X, I don't see much need for
Fortran to muck around.

Interesting note: if you are trying to convert FOrtran code to Ada, and
it does use the column slicing trick, then you are in trouble, or more
accurately, you will have to play low level games with unchecked
conversion of access types, because Ada does not allow slicing of 
multi-dimensional arrays.

Note incidentally that the ability in Fortran to pass columns is exactly
what defines the requirement for array mapping in Fortran, whereas in
Ada there are no such semantics, so the array ordering is not specified
by the language (although it is slightly suggested by the form of array
aggregates for multi-dimensional arrays).