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Michael Feldman <[log in to unmask]>
Wed, 14 Feb 2001 10:30:40 -0500
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[said Colin, quoting me:]
>
> "Two more ancient-history anecdotes:
>
> (1) In the late 80s, Philippe Kahn, founder and then-CEO of Borland,
> was quoted _on the record_ (I don't remember where) that Borland
> would never do Ada because he would never subject his products
> to someone else's validation suite."
>
> Thank you for sharing that with us.

You're welcome. (1) and (2) are, of course, directly related.
>
> "(2) At about the same time, I attended an Ada BoF at SIGCSE. One of
> the guys there was an Englishman who worked for BSI (their ANSI) and
> said he was responsible for the ISO Pascal validation suite. He said
> he respected the Ada community for their serious view of validation,
> and that Borland Pascal had failed his suite miserably. And nobody
> seemed to care."
>
> Indeed Borland didn't care that Turbo Pascal wasn't ISO compliant, and
> neither did its users. But do not make it out as a woefully failed attempt
> by a vendor to make an ISO Pascal compiler: it never tried and the market
> was completely happy. ...

Exactly. Borland didn't care, its customers didn't care, so Borland
could make whatever "Pascal" it wanted to. And one big reason Borland
didn't do Ada is because Ada users _did_ care (or at least DoD did.:-)).
>
> Colin Paul Gloster
>
Mike Feldman

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