Re: Concurrency in Language (was: future of programming languages)

From: James Rogers (jimmaureenrogers_at_att.net)
Date: 04/14/04 

Date: Wed, 14 Apr 2004 03:07:34 GMT

"Malcolm" <malcolm@55bank.freeserve.co.uk> wrote in
news:c5hcqu$rdt$1@news6.svr.pol.co.uk:

> So Ada may well be the answer to parallel programming. You do have the
> problem, not technical but political, that Ada is a military language
> and thus the military attempt to impose military-style discipline on
> Ada developers.

Ada has been used in military systems throughout the world.
The same can be said of C, C++, Fortran, and assembler. Ada was
originally developed in response to a set of requirements produced
by the U.S. Air Force. Ada has an ISO standard (ISO/IEC 8652:1995).
Ada is no more controlled by any military than it is by Microsoft,
which produces NO Ada compiler.

There are a number of current efforts to impose discipline on
software developers. Some of those efforts go by the names of
RUP, XP, and other flavors of agile programming. Ada provides
features to assist in the disciplined development of software.
It does not impose or force discipline on the development of
software. My experience supports the concept that disciplined
development, no matter what language you use, generally produces
higher quality code in a shorter time than undisciplined
development. The benefits of discipline become more evident as
the size of a development team increases.

Ada does support medium and large development teams very well.
An important part of that support is its support for disciplined
development.

Jim Rogers

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