Re: Ada

[reason67@my-deja.com]

In article <38620350.48F8FC08@gecm.com>,
  Brijesh <brijesh.malkan@gecm.com> wrote:
> I am fairly new to Ada programming and have a rather trivial question
I
> was hoping the group could help answer.
>
> I understand Ada is a very powerful language but is not used much
> outside the defence industry, I was woderign if this is a correct
> assumption and if so why is this the case - and if not where else is
it
> used.

In the USA around 1% of comercial software was written in Ada. So, your
assumption is correct.

I don't think anyone knows the reasons for sure. My personal speculation
is economic. Until fairly recently Ada compilers were very expensive
compared to C. When you buya Unix platform you got C for free with it.
(This is also why FORTRAN was so popular as it was free on old IBM
Mainfraims).

I do not have a crystal ball, but Ada could pick up. From the recent
expansion of Parallel Virtual Machine architectures, I think parallel
computing is going to be really big in a few years. The Ada runtime
could be modified to support PVM or other methods, so you could easily
port code from a 1000 machine cluster to a 5 machine cluster.

I do not know if anyone is working on this currently. After the
Holidays, I planned on looking at writing a binding to PVM for gnat 3.12
on Linux. If successful I wanted to look into using PVM as the tasking
model (instead of pthreads), but I have done almost no research at this
time.

IF Ada can be successfully merged with this new clusters, then Ada has a
real shot at being much bigger in the USA. Esp. if people
start writing parallel virtual machine libraries in Ada as
well.

Unfortunately, if I was just starting out, I would not look into Ada for
a long term career in the USA. I think I would look much more heavily
into C++.
---
Jeffrey Blatt


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