More ways to say 'program': why developers are exploiting C, Ada, Prolog and Lisp programming tools

Software Magazine, July, 1988 by Jerry Cashin

* A new declarator (long double) has been appended to the mathematical library capabilities. It will retain results from math coprocessors such as the 8087.

* The maxima and minima for integer and floating point entities are specified in #INCLUDE files LIMITS.H and FLOAT.H.

* Additional #INCLUDE files such as TIME.H., STRING.H., STDIO.H., SIGNAL.H., and STDARG.H have been precisely defined by the new standard.

* Function prototypes are used to specify the exact quantity and type of arguments within. This helps to reduce mismatched function arguments from one source module to another, providing a sort of mapping among function usage.

PORTABILITY BENEFITS USERS

Acceptance of the Ansi standard in the marketplace seems assured. Although the Unix variant of C is the most popular at the moment, most compilers already support significant provisions of the emerging standard.

Major users such as government and systems houses will undoubtedly adopt standard C in their acquisition documents, thus providing tremendous momentum for the Ansi initiative. The ultimate winner as this occurs will be the end user, because this movement toward standardization enhances the portability factor associated with C.

Woodruff believes that C is reaching out to a wider audience, a larger base of functional users. "The language is being used in areas previosly reserved for Fortran. It may even replace assembly language subroutines in Cobol," he asserts. "All of this represents an evolving trend with C technology."

A recent study of application development trends conducted by Software Magazine's Sentry Market Research Division found that C was the third most popular development language. While finishing well behind Cobol and fourth-generation languages, C did finish ahead of Fortran.

THE ADA PREDICAMENT

Ada, unlike C, may be a language in search of a mission, at least in the commercial sector. There are, of course, endless tomes and directives that describe the Ada rationale. It is to be employed in embedded systems, particularly in the military from whence it emerged. But Ada can be used to build commercial embedded systems as well.

For the military, embedded systems refer to computerized components which constitute part of an overall weapons system. In the commercial world, embedded systems could be represented by a communications controller or a distributed database module, each of which represent only a subset of a larger configuration.

The military is to be applauded for giving Ada to the world. It is an excellent programming language which incorporates almost every notable contemporary software engineering feature. Unfortunately, after providing the impetus for this technological blockbuster, Ada has not been incorporated into the software inventory to the degree one might expect (see Figure 1).

Europeans, on the other hand, are moving to adopt its superior qualities (for appropriate applications), into the operational mainstream as quickly as possible.

John Doyle, group manager in the Federal Products Group of Data General Corp., Westboro, Mass., and an authority on Ada, reports that it has taken users a gradual familiarization period to feel comfortable with the language.