Le 14/08/2024 à 08:26, Steve Litt a écrit :
> It's really too bad about Ada. Because (at least in the US) it was a
> big iron, defense project only, almost impossible to get into the game
> type language in its heyday, it never got traction with the masses.
>
> And in an era of simple languages like Pascal, C, Dbase and the like,
> no college was going to teach Ada, especially when the majority of the
> students would get Ada jobs. Good luck getting an Ada job if you
> couldn't get a security clearance. Or if you didn't want to be part of
> the war machine.
>
> It's really too bad.


    You know the story: Ada was a submission to a public call from the
US army. But the language was public. I don't know how long it took to
build a reliable compiler for the army, because it may have been secret.
But, for the public, it took many years and was buggy, which prevented
its adoption. When I learnt it, it was already well established, not
only in military applications, but in almost every application where
human life is at stake, like public transportation: automated metro, air
traffic management. In the mean time, C++ was born and grown up, with
some of the features invented in Ada, but with all the weak points of C
and a very steep learning curve, while Ada is rather easy to learn. I
had the chance to attend a one-week lecture as a bootstrap; then the
documentation found on the Internet was enough.

    I only kew two versions of Ada compilers, the one of Adacore, and
Gnat, which are very close. It seems Kevin Chadwick is in better sync
than me. I wrote Ada programs during around 10 years and stopped 9 years
ago because I retired and had no personnal project.

--     Didier