Re: A Pascal Subset of Ada (was: Why Ada is Failing Socially)

[orville@weyrich.UUCP (Orville R. Weyrich)]

In article <1991Jun26.203828.11797@netcom.COM> jls@netcom.COM (Jim Showalter) writes:
>>     By the way, in the early 80s I tried to define a Pascal subset of Ada.
>>I found it a non-trivial exercise.  The problem was, I didn't want to in-
>>clude generics,
>
>Why on earth not?

It may be of some value to consider the early history of Janus/Ada. Early
releases dis not provide generics and had to use special hacks for I/O.

Somewhat later versions provided generics that only supported instantiation
of the standard I/O routines.

Finally, full generic support was introduced.

The bottom line is, without generics you must provide some special-case
I/O, which may in turn limit the data typeing facilities which you use,
or else force you to do things that are not strictly compliant with the Ada
standard (i.e. weaken type checking for I/O routines).

In the balance, I would like to see a cheap, floppy-disk based Ada
subset with a power comparable to Turbo Pascal 4.0. It would provide
a better starting point for teaching full Ada than Turbo Pascal, Modula-2,
etc. does. Since neither of these languages are well standardized, IMHO it
would be hard to argue in favor of them against a subset of Ada with a clear
upgrade route to full standard Ada.



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Orville R. Weyrich, Jr., Ph.D.                   Certified Systems Professional
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