>Associated anecdote: I have a good friend who
>programmed Ada at my current company and who is a
>Mac fanatic.  I own a PC, and he very often would
>razz me about it whenever I mentioned problems
>with my Wintel box, mercilessly (but good-
>naturedly) ridiculing me for putting up with all


Obviously a man of Intellegence and taste with a wee bit of eccentricity
about C++ ;-)

>Ada job in the northeast.  As he was considering
>whether to take the job or not, he was in the
>middle of a big integration effort for the C++
>system he was building.  So I asked him: "how much
>time do you spend in the debugger?"  His answer:
>"about 80%!"  So I reminded him of his earlier jibes
>about PC vs Mac and mercilessly took him to task for
>not using Ada.


Well i have been involved as a developer on one program and the outside
expert called in to look at the work going on, in which large real time Ada
systems were being built with NO debugger at all!  It was more painful than
it had to be in both cases but it was done successfully, try that with
c/c++!!


A related anecdote; I did a bunch of work on a real time communications
system workstation and also on its trainer recently.  The trainer was done
almost completely in C++ which the operational system was about half ada
half C++ I would guess.  My stuff for both systems was in Ada.  I
integrated my code for the trainer (which i did completely from
requirements several thousand miles from the rest of the team) in one day
then went on to integrating with the operational system.  Interestingly
enough after a few weeks i was asked by one of the trainer folks in the lab
why my stuff was the only part of the trainer that never core dumped!  Can
you guess my answer!! Of course you can ;-)  I made sure their management
heard my answer as well and perhaps made some people think!

jim


At a recent computer software engineering course in the US, the participants
were given an awkward question to answer.  "If you had just boarded an
airliner and discovered that your team of programmers had been responsible
for the flight control software, how many of you would disembark
immediately?"
                    unknown author