Re: Magnavox consultant trashes Ada tools in IEEE Computer

[pes@inmet.camb.inmet.com (Paul Slonaker)]

I found the article to which Greg refers to be very interesting.  I'm
particularly interested in figuring out the impact of the various
design decisions on the portability of the system, and less interested
in the specific tool issues.  Still, I couldn't let this particular
lapse on the part of the author, and Greg's amplification of it, go
without comment.

In article <CxJ0G3.B9x@world.std.com>,
Gregory Aharonian <srctran@world.std.com> wrote:
>   The October 1994 issue of IEEE COMPUTER has an article from Magnavox AFATDS
>which does a pretty good job of effectively trashing Ada in a public forum.
>Written by Joseph Skazinski (who obviously must have gotten burned by Ada
>tools while working on AFATDS), the report illustrates the protectionist
>weaknesses of the Ada Mandate vis-a-vis Ada vendors.

>    "... The compilation of all Ada and C source files took
>    nearly 4 days on the HP9000, less than a day on the RISC machines,
>    and close to a week on the Intel486 machines. (The equivalent
>    amount of C or C++ would take considerably less time; for example,
>    the GNU C++ compiler completed about 30,000 lines of code in about
>    12 minutes on an Intel 486 SCO machine)."

This is carelessness on the part of either the author or the editor.  Nowhere
in the article (as far as I could find), and certainly not in this part
of it, does the author mention any size metrics for AFATDS.  Not even a
lines of code count, so that one could do an overly simple linear
extrapolation to estimate how long it would take the GNU C++ compiler
to compile the entire AFATDS.  (Ignoring, of course, any differences between
C and Ada lines of code.)

>... my favorite, comparing a 12 minute compile time for some C code that is
>equivalent to some Ada code that took a week to compile.

Greg apparently misunderstood Skazinski's [incomplete] point, and draws
the egregiously incorrect conclusion.

Paul Slonaker
Intermetrics, Inc.