Re: Array mappings

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

Following up on Mark's comments, I feel that the COBOL market is in practice
a much better opportunity for Ada 95 than the Fortran market.

I have three reasons for thinking this:

1.  It is a much bigger market, and is now in the business of climbing off
    mainframes, so systems are being rethought anyway.

2.  The COBOL world has always been much more forward thinking when it
    comes to language. This is the land of 4GL's, and it is interesting
    for instance to note the interest in Smalltalk. People are by no means
    wedded to COBOL, and they are looking around.

3.  For a Fortran user, Ada 95 and C++ look somewhat similar. Sure we can
    argue the usual "Ada is better because xxx" line where xxx has to do
    with reliability etc. etc. but in terms of raw functionality, C++ and
    Ada 95 look rather similar (and both are weaker than Fortran 90 when
    it comes to manipulating multi-dimensional arrays).

    When I say weaker here, I am talking about for example the slicing
    features of F90. Of course I still think that F90 users would be
    ahead in using Ada 95, because they would gain so much from the
    improved abstraction features, but as I said this is a sell based
    on somewhat abstract issues :-)

    On the other hand, C++ does NOT look good to COBOL folks. It signally
    lacks facilities for decimal arithmetic, which cannot be smoothly
    integrated (consider handling of literals for example) into C++.
    On the other hand, Ada 95 has gone out of its way to be COBOL
    friendly, and even includes editing modeled directly on COBOL pictures.

C