ddw (05/09/83)
Tom Slone (arizona!tom) has done a wonderful job of further muddying
the already turbid waters swirling around Ada. (Ada is a TM of the
AJPO and all that rot.) His article is a fine mixture of half-truths,
hearsay, speculation, and a dash of paranoia on the side. The original
article was quite political but I suppose the references to Ada made it
legit for this newsgroup, so I'm replying here, and trying to avoid the
politics (mostly). Taking Slone's points one by one:
Ada is a monsterously [sic] large language which is difficult to
implement. The NYU version of Ada, implemented in SETL, is
unbelievably slow.
It is indeed. However, it's odds-on that it's slow because it's written
in SETL, which is monstrously slow. Jack Schwartz gave a talk here at
Cornell a year or so ago on SETL; one of its funnier aspects was that NYU
had a SETL optimizer written in SETL, but it was so slow that they hadn't
yet gotten around to running it over itself because it would take too much
machine time.
Ada may well be difficult to implement, but it may just be that we haven't
spent enough time thinking about it. I do worry about the size of the
language; Dijkstra [name-drop time here] told me once that there are two
denotational-semantic definitions of Ada, both over 500 pages long, and
nobody has any idea if they're equivalent!
If Ada is successful, it seems likely that its use will be limited to
the DoD and its contractors. Furthermore, military computer programming
would exclusively use Ada. This would solve the major dilemma for anti-
military programmers. One would know immediately whether one is
furthering bomb building, espionage and international hanky-panky.
Hard to know where to start on this one. This "it seems likely" sort of
non-logic is annoying to argue against. I would argue that once many
programmers have been schooled in Ada, if they grow to like it they will want
to continue using it even if they cease working on military applications.
Also, a shop that does a lot of military Ada work would probably want to
simplify its life by doing various in-house things in Ada as well. So a
"We Use Ada" sign in the window may not prove much.
The influence of the military on academia has NOT been to encourage
general research and academic freedom, but to create secrecy and to
create focus upon research which has military application.
Most scientific research has military application, other than some of the
more far-out stuff in mathematics (or CS or physics or other areas that
look a lot like mathematics). Some of it is just more immediate. Besides,
military research generally has civilian applications. How do you propose
to guarantee a distinction?
The widespread use of Ada in the military-industrial complex would cut
apart those academicians and scientists who are for freedom from those
who are for secrecy. It would cut apart those who are for peace from
those who are for war and mutual fear.
Other than pointing out that people who are for war, secrecy, and mutual fear
are rather hard to find [well, they're hard to find outside of the Reagan
Administration, anyway], I think the above statement is sufficiently idiotic
that it does not need a response. I'd love to see someone even *try* and
prove it.
My fear is that Ada will either be not popular enough, and hence disappear
as another forgotten language. Or that it will become too popular, i.e.,
ubiquitous. This latter possibility seems unlikely though, as an
implementation of Ada on a micro-computer seems almost laughable.
Since Motorola should have the 68020 micro out in a couple of years, and
since it will have a full 32-bit address space, memory management, and all
that good stuff, I doubt that it's "laughable". What I really don't understand
is why Slone is worried that Ada might disappear or become ubiquitous. It might
disappear, which would mean a lot of blown tax dollars, but what's the danger?
I can't imagine it becoming ubiquitous; COBOL didn't, and DoD was behind *it*.
Certainly Ada is an improvement over COBOL in many ways and life would no
doubt be improved if Ada replaced COBOL.
Sorry about the length of this article, but I didn't see any way to make it
shorter without leaving things out.
David Wright
{vax135|decvax|purdue}!cornell!ddw
ddw@cornellbernie (05/20/83)
The only observation that I can wholeheartedly agree with is that "Ada is a improvement over COBOL in many ways". The one thing that's said about Ada most often is that it's big. It's a *very* big and complex language, requiring a lot of time/space on a small machine (if it will fit at all). Since small machines are clearly the wave of the future, Ada's part in the overall scheme of things seems questionable. The observation that small machines with 32- and 64-bit architectures and power comparable to Vaxen will soon be available changes thing very little; Ada is *still* too big, and will have to be trimmed down if people are going to use it for anything other than DoD contracts. Ada unquestionably has many nice features; however, I suspect we will see these features appearing in other languages long before we will see Ada itself in widespread use. --Bernie Roehl ...decvax!watmath!watarts!bernie