On Sat, Aug 17, 2024 at 11:24:09AM +0200, Didier Kryn wrote:
> 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.

I was tangentially related to that project as a participant in IFIP
Working 2.4 on systems languages. Many of its members were or worked
contractos to the ADA projet, so it came under regular discussion.

I remember a long session in which I explained to the army men just what
would be involved if they were to have secure pointers in their language,
but without garbage collection. At that time they decided to eave them out.
I gather that sometime later something like pointers was accepted into
ADA, but I am not aware of he details.

> 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.

If my memory is still good, the first certified ADA compiler was written
by a friend ot mine, Robert Dewar. He wrote it in SETL, a programming
language based directly on set theory.

That compiler was very slow, but it was certified.

Later, he hired ten students for a summer to hand-trandlate the whole thing into
a more efficiet language.

> 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
>

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