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From:
John McCabe <[log in to unmask]>
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Date:
Mon, 17 Apr 2000 09:12:48 +0000
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>> I was originally very sceptical about Ada, until one day I decided to try
>> it out on a noddy program in preference to C. The program worked almost
>> straight away (unlike most of my previous attempts using C), and when I moved
>> it to a DOS machine from Unix, it required trivial changes to access
>> operating system features. From that point on it became my favoured language.

>So how do we get other "skeptics" to give Ada a try?

That's a difficult one. Even though this was one of my first real attempts at
using Ada, I had already been on a 5 day course in its use, so I knew the syntax
and so on, and we had compilers available.

Getting hold of a compiler would obviously be a first step, and that isn't that
difficult any more. The problems though are that it is a bit of a vicious circle
- Ada isn't seen as sexy so, despite the availability of free compilers, people
aren't keen to try it, so it has no way of improving its sexiness!

Although ObjectAda has free versions available, I have never seen them on the
cover CD of a computer magazine. Perhaps if we all got together and lobbied some
of the computer mags to add an article on Ada, including a compiler on the cover
CD, we might have some success.

I emailed a magazine to point out an error in one of their articles, and added a
request for more, well - some, Ada, but nothing came of it.

>ObjectAda is modeled after Visual Studio.  From what I've heard from Aonix
>insiders, they lobbied Microsoft hard to be "admitted" to the Visual Studio
>family, but as there was too little benefit to MS they were never taken
>seriously.

That's interesting...

>Perhaps ObjectAda will get lucky and benefit from the US Justice Dept's
>judgments in its Anti-Trust case against Microsoft.

Sounds possible, perhaps they'll keep trying. I hope so.

John

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