eberard@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu (Edward Berard) (05/24/88)
Recently, I have talked to a number of MIS (Management Information
Systems) professionals regarding the use of Ada technology in an
environment which has been traditionally made use of COBOL, RPG,
Fourth Generation Languages (4GLs), and classic DeMarco - Conastantine
Structured Analysis and Structured Design, i.e., the typical business
or MIS environment. The people I have been talking with have a number
of observations which they conveyed to me:
1. They believed that most Ada compilers (in fact, any in the
forseeable future) generate object code which is larger and
slower than the object code which is produced for similar
programs by COBOL compilers. One organization showed me a
"benchmark" in which a company (well-known in the Ada community)
had attempted to duplicate CICS (Customer Information Control
System) in Ada. The Ada version was more than 50% slower and
larger than the COBOL version.
2. They asked me to identify any large organizations in the U.S.,
which were capable of bidding on government contracts, which had
both substantial MIS with Ada experience. They did not believe
that there were any.
3. Although several DBMS (Data Base Management System) vendors
claim to have an Ada interface to their products, when asked to
produce these interfaces, the vendors admitted that the Ada
interfaces were "still under development." Typically, the
salesforces for these vendors were blissfully ignorant of the
existence of any such interfaces.
4. Those who advertise courses with themes such as "Ada for
Business" or "Ada for COBOL Programmers" typically teach their
students to write COBOL using Ada syntax and semantics, i.e.,
"AdaBOL." The MIS professionals used this as a strong argument
against ugoing to Ada technology. "Why," they said, "should I
duplicate my current technology in a new language?"
I am looking for substantiated warstories, benchmarks, products, et
cetera, on Ada in a business environment. For example, while there is
currently no standard Ada SQL binding, are there any any Ada SQL
products available? Please send the information directly to me
(eberard@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu) and I will post a summary of the results.
-- Ed Berard
(301) 695-6960