Re: Open Systems closed to Ada?

[cis.ohio-state.edu!magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu!csn!raven!rcd@ucbvax.Berkele y.EDU (Dick Dunn)]

I think I can suggest why David Emery has found some substantial hostility
towards Ada.

emery@dr_no.mitre.org (David Emery) writes:
>I have spent the last 5 years working on IEEE Standard P1003.5 Ada
>Binding to POSIX ... It's my observation
>that the great majority of people attending POSIX meetings are C
>people...

That's hardly surprising, is it?  To be succinct, POSIX is an effort to
standardize UNIX; UNIX and C are intimately tied together and owe their
successes to one another.  For better or worse, that's incontrovertible
history.

Now, realize that UNIX was being seriously used long before Ada started to
emerge...yet UNIX was (by virtue of heavy use in developmental situations)
late to come 'round to standardization.  By the time the POSIX effort
started, it was long overdue.

>When I got started in the P1003.5 effort, I was hoping that we would
>be welcomed by the rest of POSIX.  What I expected was disinterest.
>What I found was hostility.  

Why is this surprising?  Here are these folks who have been cookin' along
with UNIX for, say, eight years or so.  They know they need a standard;
they're getting desperate.  It is academically, intellectually, and most
important, commercially imperative that they get a standard they can use.
The definition of the system interface is cast, as it has been for many
years, in terms of C.  They're ready to do it; they know what they need;
they've finally hashed out most of their differences...and all of a sudden,
along comes the kid brother saying "hey, wait for me!  You gotta let me
play too!  Mom said so!"

Why should they be patient with someone joining the game late, trying to
get a share of the action?  Why *shouldn't* they be hostile?  They've got
work to do too.  The attempt to shift to language-independent definitions
of interfaces late in the game was a major obstacle to the work.

I'm not saying that the Ada folks are wrong in wanting to be part of the
POSIX effort.  I'm saying they came late to a game already under way.
-- 
Dick Dunn    rcd@raven.eklektix.com   -or-   raven!rcd    Boulder, Colorado
	...Straight, but not narrow.