Ada Anti-News!!

Ada Anti-News!!

[Chris.Morgan]

Some of you may have read the Emacs anti-news which is provided in the manual
for people who experience time backwards. Inspired by this, we now proudly
present :

                                 Ada Anti-News

Firstly Ada is now smaller. It is very important to have the Reference Manual
in a slim handy volume, so we have removed all the Appendices and replaced some
descriptive stuff with more concise jargon.

As a result, you no longer need worry about FORTRAN, COBOL or C - they are
irrelevant now as Ada is the One True Way for software engineering - no other
languages are needed.

As the Internet is now shutting down somewhat, you will no longer find any
copies of the Rationale except occasionally in a few bookshops, as a result
anyone who understands much about Ada tasking will be a guru on your project.
Naturally this will be backed up with reduced access to Ada information via
mailing lists and WWW sites.

To give you more time to drink coffee and read the news, compilations will now
take a REALLY LONG TIME. They will take so much CPU that access to the machine
which runs the compiler will be by batch queue only. For big projects we expect
machines to start costing hundreds of thousands or even millions of pounds and
require a controlled environment, so naturally you will be able to ditch your
mouse-driven workstation (now useless) and free up desk space with a simple VT
terminal. Compiler prices should rocket as well.

Optimisers will still be present in most compilers (with less features), but
now they will sometimes make your program fail depending on which optimisations
you choose. We leave as exercise to find out which ones. Optimisation will also
take a REALLY LONG TIME.

Whilst uppping the CPU requirements we have made many other improvements.
Firstly programs are now hidden away when compiled into "libraries" which have
a hidden structure - you will have to use special tools and supporting files to
access these libraries and loading them into memory will take a REALLY LONG
TIME as they contain lots of information (don't ask). This should make you feel
more professional than those C folks.

Of course the side efect of this CPU enhancement is that home machines will no
longer be able to cope, so most affordable or free Ada compilers have now been
withdrawn. This should enhance the number of hours you are able to spend in the
office accessing the big computers.

Another way in which we have improved Ada is in the area of compilation order
and recompilation costs : in future you will gain a sense of achievement merely
by getting your program to compile, bind and link.

On large projects you will find yourself asking to be allowed to change a
package spec in a large executable only to be told that the recompilation costs
make that impossible within the timescales, due to the new recompilation
requirements. This new feature will force you to recompile even packages that
aren't really affected, and often you will not understand why. This will
enhance your appreciation of strict top-down design so you get your code right
the first time, and remove any desire to indulge in rapid prototyping or
incremental development.

When you are allowed to compile your package, you will probably take two or
three attempts to get all the last dependencies recompiled. This should allow
you to do a couple of chores or even eat lunch before your build completes.
Naturally there will be a tool which could do all this for you, but as that
will take much longer again than working it out by hand, you will probably
reserve that for extra long lunch-hours or intense Snake sessions (Snake is the
best game the new compiler hosts will support).

Another point we addressed whilst improving compilers was error messages. In
order to emphasize how great the new LRM is, we now recommend that all error
messages simply refer to the relevant section rather than foolishly trying to
explain the error itself. Some of you will be able to spend a lot of time
helping your colleagues simply to understand these references, and as a result
will probably have a chat and yet another cup of coffee. To allow some mystery
to remain, some sections of the LRM will never ever make any sense to you.

Of course, we haven't just focussed on compiler-specific issues, as we know
that there are many, many areas for improvement in the language itself :

To remove the complexities of using X-Windows or MS-Windows in your work, we
have now abolished the access to sub-routine type - you will not be able to
handle callbacks directly in your Ada, so they will become Someone Elses
Problem.

Object-Oriented Programming has been dropped. Procedural programming will make
your job appear harder to others (because it will be). You will have to give
less thought to reuse and more to straight coding.

Tasking has been slimmed down, so you should be able to implement a lot more
deadlocks and/or race conditions in your multi-threaded applications - they are
character-building and good for the soul. It is hoped that compiler vendors
will take this opportunity to build non-portable extensions to support
real-time constructs in differing non-standard ways - these used to be quite
boring when they were all standard. Similarly, we expect a nice spread of
different standard Maths packages to appear.

To keep you on your toes, we have introduced an unpredictable exception called
NUMERIC_ERROR which you will never be able to fully predict in your exception
handling code. Sometimes you will implement an exception handler for this
exception and find that CONSTRAINT_ERROR has been raised instead, and sometimes
the opposite will happen.

Now that Ada has become so specialised and unlike other languages, you will
probably find that it is only used on Defence projects and other enormous
embedded ones where the contractor can afford the investment in equipment and
staff needed with this new standard. This will remove all those non-serious
uses such as games, research and instructional use, so you will no longer have
worry about what anyone else does in any other languages.

Finally we have sprinkled some small rule changes throughout the body of the
language. These generally increase the number of special cases and
non-intuitive features which should substantially increase your overtime claims
in hectic months.

Have Fun!

:-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-):-)

Chris Morgan
chris.morgan@baesema.co.uk

Disclaimer : Just Kidding!!!

Re: Ada Anti-News!!

[Chris Morgan]

In article <009A2AACB8BFDAEF.3E59@smcsr3.smcs.se.baesema.co.uk>,
Chris.Morgan@BAESEMA.CO.UK wrote (a joke :-)

If anyone replied by e-mail after Bob Duff and Sam Harbaugh, well my
e-mail gateway was broken and losing messages for a week so sorry I didn't
get your message so please resend.

Chris

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-- Chris Morgan, BAeSEMA Limited   
--   chris.morgan@baesema.co.uk    
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--           Team Ada              
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