Re: FYI - Lead Designer of Ada Dies

["Beliavsky" <beliavsky@aol.com>]

Steve Lionel, for many years a Fortran compiler developer, once worked
on an Ada compiler, and
his tribute to Jean Ichbiah and the Ada language are at
http://softwareblogs.intel.com/2007/03/05/a-farewell-to-jean/ , copied
below.

By Steve Lionel (6 posts) on March 5th, 2007 at 8:38 am

"If you asked me what my favorite programming language is, you might
be surprised when I don't say Fortran.  No, my favorite is Ada, the
language named for the first computer programmer and the result of an
international competition sponsored by the US Department of Defense.
Jean Ichbiah, the creator of the "Green" language which became Ada,
died January 26 at the age of 66.

I met Jean, briefly, back in 1984 when I was working on DEC's VAX Ada
compiler project.  In March of 1984 I had the delightful task of
traveling to Versilles, France, to deliver to Ichbiah's company Alsys
a magtape containing the first beta test version of VAX Ada.  I spent
a week with the Alsys team helping them shake out the compiler, which
went on to be one of the most highly regarded implementations of the
language.  My main assignment from 1983 through 1988 was project
leader for VAXELN Ada, a variant which ran on VAX systems under the
real-time and embedded OS VAXELN, created by Dave Cutler just before
he left DEC for Microsoft. In August 1988 I then joined the VAX
Fortran compiler team.

Ada was an elegant and full-featured language with extremely
expressive declaration features, multitasking, exception handling, a
module facility with intelligent separate compilation and much more.
The language gave the programmer the ability to tell the compiler what
was allowed and not allowed to happen in the program and this enabled
the compiler to do checking at a level rarely seen in other
languages.  I liked to say that if you could get an Ada program to
compile, it would probably run correctly the first time.  This, of
course, was one of the things that the DoD wanted.

The DoD mandate that Ada must be used in defense contracts was both a
blessing and a curse for Ada.  A blessing in that it jumpstarted the
widespread use of the language, but a curse in that many developers
were dragged kicking and screaming into the world of Ada and non-
defense programmers often avoided Ada specifically because of the DoD
connection.  After ten years, the screaming became loud enough that
the DoD dropped the Ada mandate, and Ada use pretty much dropped out
of sight.  The orignal Ada 83 language was updated to Ada 88 and again
in 1995, but DEC and most other vendors did not update their
implementations.

What's the relevance of Ada to Fortran?  Some of the major Fortran 90
features, such as modules and generics, are derived at least in part
from Ada. Fortran's separate compilation model made it difficult to
implement one of Ada's most elegant module features, IS SEPARATE,
which permitted the implementation of a module procedure to be
compiled separately from its declaration.  The "submodules" proposal
for Fortran 2008 finally brings that to the language.

So what's my second favorite language?  SNOBOL."