Re: Have the Itanium critics all been proven wrong?

[Adam Beneschan <adam@irvine.com>]

On Tuesday, August 21, 2012 7:32:55 PM UTC-7, Bill Findlay wrote:
 
> > At least during the AJPO period and MIL-STD/1815A, the Ada 
> > specification was NO SUBSETS and NO SUPERSETS were permitted to call
> > themselves Ada. (This doesn't cover optional annexes, just the core
> > language).
> 
> Yes.  That was enforced rigorously.  But things are different now.
> 
> The Restrictions pragma allows the programmer to exclude features that are
> considered inappropriate for a particular application.  So it could be said
> that Ada now has 2**N subsets, where N is the number of Restrictions 
> options.  I don't have an exact count, but N is of the order of 50.

That's not at all the same thing.  The first has to do with implementors providing a compiler that only implements a subset of the required Ada features, and still calling it Ada; the second has to do with the language providing a feature by which users can restrict the features they themselves use.  A compiler that handles all the features of Ada is not implementing a "subset" of Ada even if it supports all the Restrictions pragmas.  

The big thing that's different is that while in the past, the US government tried to copyright the name "Ada" and prevent implementors from calling incompletely implemented compilers "Ada compilers" by legal means, they don't try to do that any more.

                           -- Adam