And to me, ADA always looked like something designed by a government committee.
It lacked ‘elegance’. It just seemed like C with some new features and different syntax.
The contest was NEVER about pushing the state of the art. It was about doing tried and true several year old technology. Remember, the big thing at the time was that the services couldn’t communicate through languages. These were still the days when people wrote simulators for a machine simulating an older machine simulating a still older machine, and on it sat a compiler compiling some unused language.
The rules were that the result for each language would be Ada PLUS two of their own languages. The Navy chose SPL/I, a language I worked on and a book I wrote, and oh, my mind is freezing for the other. We never got far enough with CS-4. I’m thinking it was a SofTech language but my mind is mud. The army had TACPOL[E?] which became the army standard language because it was the only one they could find used on two separate projects. I’m afraid it’s been too many years. I’m fuzzing on details I used to know.
each language ==> each service