Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> As I said, lots of kernels are written in FORTH (for small machines) or Ada 
>> (for dangerous machines).
> 
>   I wonder why Ada never got much popularity, even though it was really
> pushed at some point (especially by the US government, AFAIK). Was it
> lack of compilers for common hardware or something?

Expense, I think. The GNU Ada compiler is currently the most featureful out 
there. But to call yourself Ada (at least for the first decade or so) you 
had to pay a fairly large sum to pass certification tests. You couldn't put 
something out there you'd thrown together, followed most but not all of the 
standard, and had compiler bugs you'd fix in the next release, and still 
market an Ada compiler.

Since things like compilers *are* things for which FOSS works great, that 
kind of put a big dent in Ada's adoption, I think. That and the FUD, of course.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

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