bob@imspw6.UUCP (Bob Burch) (04/23/88)
I have a number of rather dumb questions regarding Ada which most viewers may have heard many times, my apologies; I would appreciate any views or info. It is difficult to discern how much of what I hear bears any relationship to reality. The Booch book obviously presents Ada as a kind of a later-day replacement for Cobol i.e. giant projects for which maintenance and readability are far more critical than execution speed, and yet, it is mission-critical tasks (presumably embedded systems etc.) for which Ada seems to have been mandated by several of the services. Several recent articles have described requests by the military for Ada-specific chips for embedded systems, as if current micro-chips couldn't handle it. What is the reality? What sort of things, if any, cannot be done in Ada at the present? If there are any total failings, what are prospects for resolution and in what time-frames? Has anybody done any kind of a systems-integration project primarily involving AT class (or 386) type machinery and graphics using Ada? Is such a thing possible at this time and, if so, what is the differential in cost as opposed to doing the same project in, say, Turbo C? I would appreciate any and all info. Ted Holden HTE