Pointers Are More Abstract Than You Might Expect in C

Re:Pointers Are More Abstract Than You Might Expect in C by Koshkin on Monday July 02, 2018 @11:08AM (#17442281)

I have always kind of wondered why Ada did not catch on as a systems programming language (I think it was designed to fill that niche as well).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Pointers Are More Abstract Than You Might Expect in C by mcguire on Monday July 02, 2018 @01:32PM (#17443690)

1. At the time (i.e. pre-C++), it was a gigantic language. Further, because of the Ada policies (IIRC), you could not subset the language; you had to include the full multi-process model to call it "Ada", for example.

2. There were no good, cheaply available implementations of Ada. GNAT was originally quite awkward and finicky when I first poked at it, years after seeing Ada in a class (and I can't remember what compiler we used there).

3. Most importantly, no common, popular systems picked it up as the preferred systems programming language. MacOS had Pascal for a while, Windows went with C or C++.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Pointers Are More Abstract Than You Might Expect in C by pjmlp on Monday July 02, 2018 @01:38PM (#17443742)

Rational Software actually started their business selling Ada Machines, yep just like Lisp Machines but with Ada, but they pivoted into selling just compilers.

[ Parent | on HN ]