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From: larry@JPL-VLSI.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.lang.ada
Subject: ...Ada Technology (cont.)...
Message-ID: <8604010616.AA13731@ucbvax.berkeley.edu>
Date: Mon, 31-Mar-86 22:54:27 EST
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Posted: Mon Mar 31 22:54:27 1986
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What fun to work at home.  My lady's CAT just jumped on the END-MESSAGE key!
Murphy's Law strikes again.

There are at least three major types of concurrency involved and several variations on each.  Dynamic memory and inter-process communication has the same problem.  And different compilers treat pointers in subtly different ways that cause 
more problems than major differences would have.

It's for this reason that many C and Unix experts have been involved in efforts to create standards (ANSI X3J11 and IEEE P1003, respectively).  And AT&T is 
gently pushing an upwardly compatible superset of C know as C++ which adds some
of the features now available in Ada.  (More specifically, C++ resembles 
Simula-67.)

So perhaps in a couple of years we'll be able to do in the C/Unix world what we
can already do in Ada: insulate modules from each other and from the machine 
but still be able to tailor the entire system to specific hardware.

                     Larry @ jpl-vlsi