Historical language survey

[Sean Kelly]

Dave wrote:
> Sean Kelly wrote:
>> Peter C. Chapin wrote:
>>> kris <foo at bar.com> wrote in news:e8kg0a$14hu$1 at digitaldaemon.com:
>>>
>>>> Ada
>>>
>>> I'm not sure how "historical" Ada is... there is currently an active 
>>> community of Ada users. In any case, I use Ada a fair amount. In 
>>> fact, as I write this I have some Ada code that I'm working on open 
>>> in another window.
>>
>> For whatever reason, Ada doesn't seem to be a terribly popular 
>> language for everyday programming.  It has a lot of nice features 
>> though, and I've always been somewhat interested in finding the time 
>> to play with it a bit.  In many respects it seems like a stricter 
>> version of D.
>>
> 
> Isn't Ada still used (required?) for a lot of Dept. of Defense software 
> in the U.S.?

I believe Ada was designed on a DoD contract, so it's not surprising 
that it's used quite a bit in the military.  More generally however, Ada 
seems be the language of choice for systems that simply cannot fail, be 
they railway switches, supertanker engine systems, etc.  However, I was 
surprised to hear that C/C++ is making inroads in these areas--probably 
because so many more people know C/C++ than Ada.


Sean