From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,e5bfa021bc026369 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2004-01-26 15:53:44 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news2.google.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!news.glorb.com!news.alt.net!pd7cy2so!shaw.ca!border1.nntp.ash.giganews.com!border2.nntp.sjc.giganews.com!border1.nntp.sjc.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!local1.nntp.sjc.giganews.com!nntp.comcast.com!news.comcast.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2004 17:53:40 -0600 Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2004 18:53:39 -0500 From: "Robert I. Eachus" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Personality Conflict was: why Ada is so unpopular ? References: <401524D4.CBDA0658@mitre.org> <101at48fggcated@corp.supernews.com> In-Reply-To: <101at48fggcated@corp.supernews.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <0bCdnWXdYdAYNYjdRVn-hA@comcast.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.147.77.160 X-Trace: sv3-ouD0my/YHA2x2fUGGFoXUU7JkvcdhdXw3mBrJ407k8N6NAyCs0vxrStA/qDahsvMNHTWv7egrxHaSzb!G2YTeCA0WMOHTTNY19FGxHHZ8WZfHKEDV5SQikYYb4L5d32gNZweD9A0TFu/eA== X-Complaints-To: abuse@comcast.net X-DMCA-Complaints-To: dmca@comcast.net X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.1 Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:4851 Date: 2004-01-26T18:53:39-05:00 List-Id: Randy Brukardt wrote: >>Mike Brenner writes: >> >>>B. There is no central email address where we can submit suggestions >>>for language changes. >> >>Yes there is: ada-comment@ada-auth.org It doesn't matter. For a couple of years, my office was next to Mike's at MITRE, and even when I moved down the hall, I was still available. Also both MITRE Bedford and MITRE Washington had significant input into the Ada 9X requirements process, not to mention my involvement in the actual development. Ben Brosgol, Dave Emery, and I did a lot of the Information Systems Annex work. (Dave and I were both at MITRE Bedford when that was going on.) Incidently, I am not really picking on Mike about this. It is very similar to the discussion about preprocessors. Why don't Ada programmers use pre-processors? Not because they are not available, Verdix always had a pre-processor, and now GNAT has one, I don't know about other compilers. But I don't care. There is a Ada programming culture and it says that pre-processor are icky. Shrug! Changes to the language STANDARD won't change that, just as changing the standard can't fix most of Mike's complaints. They are really cultural opinions, and that is just not something that the ARG can fix. To be honest, it is not something that anyone on the ARG or at WG9 wants to fix. Ada serves a several specific groups. Ada serves them well. And we must consider that base important when trying to "reach out" to the C and C++ communities, which have a different culture. Actually, let me give one further example. In Ada 0Y there will probably be a feature that allows calls to operations on tagged types to be made in the object.operation syntax. Will it help convert C++ programmers to Ada? I don't think so. In fact, I think that most Ada programmers will ignore it, just like pragmas that can have pre-processor-like effects are ignored, Unchecked_Conversion is seldom used, and so on. Those are cultural not language decisions. We can put the features there, but we can't make Ada programmers like them. At that is what most of Mike's complaints boil down to. I can do THIS in Ada, but I don't like the way I have to do it. If anyone has a solution to that common complain, let me know, because I sure don't. -- Robert I. Eachus "The war on terror is a different kind of war, waged capture by capture, cell by cell, and victory by victory. Our security is assured by our perseverance and by our sure belief in the success of liberty." -- George W. Bush