Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!caen!hellgate.utah.edu!csn!boulder!wilkinson.Colorado.EDU!judd From: judd@wilkinson.Colorado.EDU (Xenu Galactic-Conqueror) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy Subject: Re: Language Wars Message-ID: <1991May28.173812.4183@colorado.edu> Date: 28 May 91 17:38:12 GMT References: <14750@ucrmath.ucr.edu> <8_4Ha8!f@cs.psu.edu> Sender: news@colorado.edu (The Daily Planet) Organization: University of Colorado, Boulder Lines: 98 Nntp-Posting-Host: wilkinson.colorado.edu I didn't REALLY want to get involved in this one, but both Ada and Fortran are under attack once again, and somebody has to defend them. In article jpc@fct.unl.pt (Jose Pina Coelho) writes: > >In article <8_4Ha8!f@cs.psu.edu> melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D >Mellinger) writes: >> If assembler is so great, why don't we just stick with the 68K series >> forever? Moto. will surely oblige us. Because, as has been said before: Use the right tool for the right job. But I think you knew that. >> ALWAYS take your vitamins and get plenty of sleep. Get real. I'll Whatever... >> name the language and you name the "right" job. >Can you smell the smoke comming ? :-) > >C - Operating systems, small programs. >Ada - Can this be used ? I remmember fifteen lines to say hello world. Sigh... with TEXT_IO use TEXT_IO procedure HELLO_WORLD is begin put("Hello World"); put_line(" "); end HELLO_WORLD; Significantly less than fifteen lines. Ada is a neat language. Proper design will produce a program that is extrememly portable (usually little to no modification is necessary), easy to read, easy to maintain, easy to develop, and you have a tendency to have code with fewer bugs, quite important for things such as a guidance system on a missile, for instance. Ada supports all sorts of neat things, like overloaded operators, separate compilation, unconstrained arrays, derived types, and on and on and on. I am surprised that it hasn't made a strong showing on the Amiga, with it's TASK structure I would think it would fit right in. I would love to just talk about the language, but that would take far too much time and bandwidth - read a book on Ada. It's cool. So, what would you use it for? It lends itself to very portable packages, so scientific software that needs to go between ten different platforms is an excellent application. It also works well for real time applications. Ada fits in really nicely with a Cray as well. So much so, in fact, that Ada may become the language of choice on a Cray. Now, as I said earlier, the Amiga would seem to be an ideal Ada platform. If someone wrote a good Ada copmiler for a couple hundred bucks and marketed it well, stressing the Amiga development environment... assuming Cray survives the onslaught of multi-processor machines, one could probably sell a lot of Amigas into the scientific community. By way of reference, the scaled down Ada compiler on an IBM costs $600. The full version costs $900. Ada on a Sun will fetch $18000.... >Cobol - Shoot the programmers. >Fortran - Shoot the grannys. Double sigh... CS weenies strike again. For many business applications Cobol used to beat the snot out of everything, especially on a machine built around it (like some of the old Borroughs machines). There is more to life than databases and O(1) sorts, you know. Fortran is designed for high-powered scientific applications. Get on a Cray sometime - You are vain and silly if you intend to use any other language for that purpose. >> "My computer is better than your computer." -- Amiga and NeXT junkies. >> >> But it is :-). I say: "ALWAYS use the right computer for the job." >> :-) I'm under the impression that you will do anything to avoid an >> argument. Sorry pal, if you read the net, you are required to think a >> little. To quote a message from a while back (Larry Phillips, perhaps?)... "Gee, what an oxy>>>MORON<<<." -Steve >-- >Jose Pedro T. Pina Coelho | BITNET/Internet: jpc@fct.unl.pt >Rua Jau N 1, 2 Dto | UUCP: ...!mcsun!unl!jpc >1300 Lisboa, PORTUGAL | Home phone: (+351) (1) 640767 -- judd@sgt-york.lanl.gov ...!ncar!boulder!tramp!judd Los Alamos National Laboratory // Univ. of Colo at Boulder A-3 Systems Analysis \X/ Applied Mathematics Women and men (both dong and ding) summer autumn winter spring reaped their sowing and went their came sun moon stars rain -e.e. cummings