Re: The actual quote from the Post AAS article

[mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)]

In article <1993Mar16.210613.7208@mksol.dseg.ti.com> mccall@mksol.dseg.ti.com (fred j mccall 575-3539) writes:
>
>The argument that Ada tends to use different words for concepts that
>were already known in other parts of the industry by different names
>is fairly true, I would say, but I'm not sure that 'HOL' is an example
>of that particular 'newspeak'.
>
I agree that some of Ada's terms differ from some of ither languages'
terms. But many of Ada's terms were inherited from general language
development work (elaboration comes to mind). These terms seem strange
because the Ada standard is the first one to try to teach them to
the general techie public.

"Access type" as a substitute for "pointer type" comes to mind as one of
the few Ada terms that was not in use before - and even that one may have
come from elsewhere, I don't know.

There is a general situation I have characterized as "Feldman's Law
of Programming Terminology": Two languages implementing the same idea
must, on pain of death, use different terms.

This is not uniquely an Ada problem. E.g., Prof. Wirth, in designing the 
Modula family, did so _after_ Ada's terms were known. He had any
number of existing terms he could choose for "package spec" and
"package body". But he chose "definition module" and "implemehntation
module". He also chose "opaque type" for roughly what Ada calls
a private type. Yes, I know there are subtle differences. That's
actually the point. No 2 languages do the same thing in _exactly_
the same way (it would be REAL boring if they did:-)), so the terms
have to be changed to make the difference obvious.

I think this problem will always be with us, especially in the 
computing business where so much is based on perception and
religion. We will continue making up the terms as we go along.
In this regard, Ada is squarely in the mainstream.

Mike Feldman