| Simon, you should also add Ada to your list. I know there is a lot
of uninformed mind-set against Ada because of its origins, but...
It is *much* better than Cobol and Basic for mainstream s/w development,
it was designed from the start for multi-threaded applications,
it was designed from the start for building reliable applications,
it has an ISO standard, and a validation/certification process,
it has widely available compilers for all mainstream machines,
Digital has the best Ada compilers for OpenVMS VAX, OpenVMS AXP, OSF/1
AXP, and Mips/Ultrix,
The new Ada9X ISO standard, which is an upwards compatible extension of
the existing Ada ISO standard, is due out next year - well ahead of C++'s
standard, and includes portions aimed directly at
- object-oriented programming
- high performance threads
- financial calculations
- distributed applications
and yet the language is still simpler than C++
If you can get hold of the last five years worth of Tri-Ada Conference
Proceedings, you will see that there are a lot of success stories of
successfully integrated large distributed and client/server Ada
applications
/Bevin
|
| You don't mention any constraints, and intrinsicly none of those
languages is particularly suited to client-server. I would only choose
one of COBOL, BASIC, C if availability of programmers and number of
target environments was a very high priority.
C++, Bliss, PL/1, POP2, Ada, ALGOL68, and many other languages have
macro or library facilities that enable you to adapt them to a particular
type of development. COBOL, BASIC, C are almost free of these
facilities.
I would avoid BASIC. On many platforms it is implemented as a
semi-compiler/interpreter, and this affects the performance. The
different implementations give almost as much temptation to write
non-portable code as C does.
COBOL will give you the most portable code of anything except Ada.
Personally I hate the language, but it does give you almost guaranteed
portability at source code level.
|
| From comp.lang.ada
/Bevin
ps: If you look in the Ada notes conference under the keyword Usage
you will find a lot more info
<formfeed>
Article: 4782
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.software-eng
From: [email protected] (Dave McAllister)
Subject: Re: TRI-Ada '94 Topics
Sender: [email protected] (Net News)
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 1993 15:
34:50 GMT
In article <[email protected]>, [email protected] (Mike Berman)
writes:
|> [email protected] (Robert Dewar) writes:
|> >The suggestion of a talk from an organization using Ada in a non-mandated
|> >setting seems a good one to me. An obvious candidate is Silicon Graphics.
|> >Not only are they using Ada for all their virtual reality stuff, but also
|> >they strongly claim that they could not have succeeded in this taskusing
|> >C++ and it would be interesting to here why.
|>
|> I couldn't agree more on the topic or the speaker, but why wait until
|> '94? Dave already gave this talk at WADAS '93, and this talk would be better
|> off if given at a conference with more general appeal.
|>
|> I know that Ada Paintball is being demoed at OOPSLA. What we need for
|> Tri-Ada '94, or, better yet, OOPSLA, Object Expo, etc., etc., is more
|> proof positive along the same lines as what SGI has already done.
|>
|>
|>
|> --
|> Mike Berman
|> University of Maryland, Baltimore County Fastrak Training, Inc.
|> [email protected] (301)924-0050
|> The views represented in the above post are my own.
SGI builds the tools to build the neat stuff. What we do with Ada is break
the conventional boundaries... along with the hardware, OS, linker, graphics
pipeline
...
Actually, you'll hear something along these lines from Way Ting, Vice
President
of the Visual Magic Division at SGI in this years TRI/Ada keynote.
(along with
more 'way' jokes than you can stand.... "Way to go Way.... we're still
WaiTing!)
dave McAllister
|