RE: Is a RDBMS needed?

  • From: "Goulet, Richard" <Richard.Goulet@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <Laimutis.Nedzinskas@xxxxxx>, <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2011 10:16:06 -0400

Well, for those who never heard of Ada
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_%28programming_language%29)and it's
link to PL/SQL, the US DOD has/had an Ada Joint Systems Program
Office(JSPO) in the Pentagon back in the 80's.  The idea was to create a
replacement for Cobol, Jovial, C-Atlas, Fortran, and a lot of other
computer languages that was costing them lots of dollars to maintain
each year.  The usual capitalistic idea was to have DOD in conjunction
with universities, primarily MIT I believe, create a computer language
to handle all of this advanced processing and then incentivize as well
as punish contractors into using this new language there by replacing
all of the previously created and unmanageable stuff.  Sounds like a
good idea, right?  You add money to a procurement contract when the
contractor uses Ada and you penalize them when they don't by removing
money or making them prove they can't do what they need with the new
language.  And to promote the reuse of existing modules you add more
bonuses.  Problem, the compile sequence can overwrite modules in the
standard library thereby making it appear that you reused an existing
module.  OOPS!!!  Oracle also in conjunction with the Ada JSPO crated
what was known as PRO*Ada, which worked very well
(http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/A57673_01/DOC/api/doc/PAD18/ch11.htm
).

Anyway, after some time creating Ada, the master engineer supposedly
retired from the Ada JSPO and went to work for Oracle.  About a year
later we were all introduced to PL/SQL.  (http://www.orafaq.com/wiki/Ada
and  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PL/SQL)

Richard Goulet
Senior Oracle DBA/Na Team Leader

-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
Laimutis.Nedzinskas@xxxxxx
Sent: Friday, June 10, 2011 1:38 AM
To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Is a RDBMS needed?

>"Goulet, Richard" <Richard.Goulet@xxxxxxxxxxx>
anyone ever hear of Ada?  Few billions of US tax payer dollars went down
that black hole to no good end and that was supported by one of the
largest institutions in the world, the US Pentagon.  So much for who
supports it.
BTW: If you've ever heard of PL/SQL then you've heard of Ada, by another
name.

I beg pardon. Billions must have gone into a secret UFO laboratory. But
judging from PL/SQL - ADA is a beauty. An attempt to depart from years
old, obscure and unreadable C syntax. No offence intended - as far as I
remember one of design reasons for  {}-usage instead of readable
BEGIN-END/END IF/END LOOP was to save space and typing time... And that
is only one example. No longer an issue on the modern hardware...

as for the original question - this is a university, right ? Let them
give a try. May be some javadb++ will come out of it ( ACID compliant
and all )

Brgds, Laimis N

--
//www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l


--
//www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l

Other related posts:

  1. Home
  2. oracle-l
  3. Archive
  4. 06-2011