[Info-vax] Viable versus ideal programming languages

[John Dallman]

In article <j9umb1F5949U1 at mid.individual.net>, bill.gunshannon at gmail.com
(Bill Gunshannon) wrote:

> I do have to admit that I am baffled why no one made/makes an
> Ada compiler to do this.  I thought that was one of the intents
> of Ada.  But it looks like language snobbery is strong in Ada.
> Probably why even the agency responsible for it refused to use
> it when it finally came out.

The crucial time for Ada was in the eighties, when compilers of that
complexity were hard to write. Ada wasn't available enough, and the
compilers that were available were too expensive for people teaching
themselves programming at home. Learning the language the DoD wanted you
to use wasn't something that appealed to many young people at the time. 

As it was, C got established through the explosion of different Unix
versions, and because it proved to be a good language for MS-DOS
programming. 

> No, cause that's not the intended purpose of that language.  But
> that really has nothing to do with writing libraries.

It can have a lot to do with writing libraries. Depends on what the
libraries need to do. The ones I work on have to do a lot of in-memory
data management. Their predecessors were written in Fortran, but that was
replaced by C plus a custom pre-processor because that was better suited
to the work. 

John