Re: Speeding up Emacs load time

[Emanuel Berg]

Juanma Barranquero <lekktu@gmail.com> writes:

> Well, DoD sponsored Ada, but Ada was never meant to be a
> military-only language, and in fact today is more likely used in
> high-security non-military settings (cars, avionics, trains,
> rockets, medical equipment, etc.)

I stumbled upon a book in my school's library on RTSs, and I found
some interesting material on Ada. Apparently, the DoD wanted it
because there were massive "reinvention of the wheel" all around
the US military. Software solving the same tasks were developed
over and over, in different languages. The army preferred FORTRAN,
the navy CMS-2, and the air force JOVIAL (of those, I've only
heard of FORTRAN). So, the people at the DoD wanted to put an end
to this, because the DoD was the biggest buyer of software in the
world. After a competition what language to pick, they went for
Ada. Ada was (is) great, but perhaps too much so: early compilers
did not create fast executables, and programmers were not used to
think in the lines of the Ada task model. For simple tasks, Ada
was too bulky.

-- 
Emanuel Berg - programmer (hire me! CV below)
computer projects: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
internet activity: http://home.student.uu.se/embe8573