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Thu, 8 Oct 1998 11:36:19 -0700
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On a more serious note.

Some of the bad points that I've heard about Ada have been:

1)  The time it takes to compile.  Granted, the Ada compilers
    generally take longer to compile programs than C/C++
    compilers (for the same amount of code) but they also do
    alot more work (there are more compile time errors in Ada
    than C/C++ and few, in my experience, runtime errors.)

2)  The language dosen't "support" (take your pick)  as part of
    the language.  These are normally binary, pointer, or memory
    operations that are machine specific and fall into the
    infamous 'Chapter 13'.  Much of this was originally supposed
    to be addressed in the Ada 9x specification.  I've been out
    of the Ada programming area for the last few years so I can't
    say if they have or haven't addressed these issues.

3)  The language is too large, or too verbose, etc.  This was always
    (IMHO) a fictional argument.  The language is so much like Pascal,
    so regular, and so well documented that what seems like it should
    work normally does work and if it works one way doing one thing it
    works the same way doing something else.

4)  The cost of the compilers is too high is another complaint.  This
    gone away do to the efforts of some very nice people writing several
    freeware/public domain Ada compilers and environments.

One of the major reasons that I see preventing the use of Ada by
companies is their desire to hire people off the street and put them
directly to work programming (note I don't use the term 'Software
Engineering' here...).  The people I ran into at IBM that had 15 to 20
years there had all been sent to company schools that took 6 to 9 months
(before they went to their assigned jobs.)  When I started I had 2 half
days of inprocessing and started working on their systems the first day.

The companies I've worked for (or interviewed with since then) have all
wanted you to have the skills before starting to work for them and none
seemed willing to invest the time and money for training their people.
This is just my experience, I hope other people have had different
experiences.

Ron


> From [log in to unmask] Thu Oct  8 08:49 PDT 1998
>
> Dear team members,
>
> I am giving a short lecture to fellow students on ADA and its uses.  I have
> a fair amount of literature on its history , what it looks like, how to use
> it, and its advantages over certain other languages (which I won't mention
> here).  But like most people, I believe everything has its pros and cons,
> its good and bad points.  I cant really find much in the way to say bad
> about it, I'm sure there's a lot of you out there which would say thetas
> because it doesn't have any bad points, but equally there may be a few who
> look at it in a broader view, and may be able to give me their opinions on
> what is its bad points, or why people aren't using it.  It is just a lack
> of training, lack of decent advertising, cost of manpower involved?
>
> Please and sensible answers or opinions greatly appreciated.
> Thanks in advance
>
> Neil Evans
>
>
>
> *************************************
>      Neil Evans
>      Z2 Room 2 (The Z sheds)
>      Horwood Hall
>      Keele University
>      N Staffs
>
>      [log in to unmask]
>      01782 246853
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