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From: mangoe@umcp-cs.UUCP (Charley Wingate)
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: Re: Who Wants Ada?
Message-ID: <56@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 8-Jun-85 11:15:12 EDT
Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.56
Posted: Sat Jun  8 11:15:12 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 10-Jun-85 21:50:42 EDT
References: <11117@brl-tgr.ARPA> <1593@reed.UUCP> <494@bonnie.UUCP>
Organization: U of Maryland, Computer Science Dept., College Park, MD
Lines: 36

In article <494@bonnie.UUCP> spf@bonnie.UUCP (Steve Frysinger) writes:

>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.

No, it seems to me that a very different point is indicated.  About the only
assumption Pascal makes about a machine is that characters are addressable
individually.  C, on the other hand, requires all sorts of features: all the
incrementation and decrementation operators, pointers you can do math with,
ASCII, and a couple of other things.  This, not suprisingly, is very much
like what a PDP-11 supplies.  On other machines, however, these things must
often be simulated, or the feature is more expensive; what you get is a
language that contains a wierd PDP-11 assembler generating code for a
different machine.  Hence it's not suprising that the Pascal is much faster;
consider the inefficiencies of C on a machine that is radically unlike a
PDP-11, such as a Sperry or CDC machine!

My gut reaction is that people are afraid of ADA because of the experience
with PL/1.  The only dialects of PL/1 that really saw much use away from IBM
machines were the various systems languages (PL/S, PLUS, PLM, etc.), which
were stripped of much of the high-overhead stuff and given primitives
appropriate to a particular machine.  DOD has already stated that it will
not allow similar languages attached to ADA.  Given the ongoing development
of other, cheaper languages, I don't think ADA has much of a chance; the
arrival of the first reasonable compiler for FORTRAN 8X will probably do it
in.

Charley Wingate    umcp-cs!mangoe