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To: NVDave
A guy I know back in the 80's was part of some DOD project using ADA. Something happened and they needed to meet some deadline. However, the compiler was so slow that compiling the program with an ADA compiler would have taken longer than the deadline.

They ended up translating the entire ADA program into assembly by hand.

10 posted on 07/19/2009 1:07:10 PM PDT by ketsu (ItÂ’s not a campaign. ItÂ’s a taxpayer-funded farewell tour.)
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To: ketsu

That was indeed a problem in the very early 80’s Ada compilers. That’s certainly not a problem now. There’s now an Ada compiler built on the GCC back-end that works quite nicely and there is active work on it all the time.

The Boeing 777 FMS is written in Ada. They started with C++ and Ada, and by the time they were about 40% of the way into the coding, they realized that the reliability of the Ada code was so much better, they canned the C++ version of the projects and converted everyone over to Ada.

Ada got a bad rap from those early compilers, especially the NYU/Ed compiler written in Setl, which was horribly slow (like three lines of source code compiled per minute of CPU time). This allowed an opening for crap like C++ to get a chokehold on the US software industry, with the attending results we see today.


12 posted on 07/19/2009 3:22:17 PM PDT by NVDave
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