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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!bonnie!spf
From: spf@bonnie.UUCP (Steve Frysinger)
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: Re: Who Wants Ada?
Message-ID: <494@bonnie.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 4-Jun-85 08:23:01 EDT
Article-I.D.: bonnie.494
Posted: Tue Jun  4 08:23:01 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 6-Jun-85 01:23:36 EDT
References: <11117@brl-tgr.ARPA> <1593@reed.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Whippany NJ
Lines: 28

> In article <11117@brl-tgr.ARPA> ron@BRL.ARPA (Ron Natalie) writes:
> >And if the people who wrote UNIX had done it in Ada, it wouldn't
> >be any better...
> 
> It would probably not be better for readability (although I know many
> people who are very fluent in reading C hack), and it would certainly
> be much the worse for flexibility and speed. This is what the Ada people
> need to drive through their skulls: we don't want another COBOL or
> Pascal! (No personal offence to "Ada people".)
> 
> 						Mark Galassi
> 					...!tektronix!reed!rosalia
> {These views are mine and should be everybody else's :-) }

Just for the record, on my DEC PRO 350 (a PDP-11/23 running RSX-11M)
the code generated by the Pascal compiler has consistently been 50-100%
FASTER than the code generated by Whitesmith's C compiler.

The point is this: C is not necessarily more efficient than Pascal (or
Ada, etc).  The quality of the compiler and run-time system is where
it's at.  While I'm not in love with either Ada or C, the argument I
read on the net sounds more like defense of the familiar (C) against
the unknown (Ada), which is not a very open-minded frame of mind for
people in a high-tech, fast-paced industry.

Steve Frysinger

Why would I waste my time expressing anybody's opinions but my own?