Re: Two ideas for the next Ada Standard

[Jonas Nygren <jonas@joy.ericsson.se>]

Robert Dewar wrote:
> 
> Incidentally I think random discussion of new ideas for Ada by email
> or in this newsgroup is largely wasted effort. Note that the first
> step in the Ada 9X effort was to collect revision suggestions in
> a very formal form, with a formal submission procedure.
> 
> As I said before, I think this is premature anyway. People do not know
> Ada 95 well enough to make useful suggestions yet, so the discussion
> of new features will have a very high noise-to-signal ratio, with
> a lot of suggestions simply reflecting a lack of understanding of
> how Ada 95 can be used to solve the problems. At least 5 years needs
> to go by before there is enough perspective to understand what, if
> anything, that is really important, is missing or inconvenient in the
> language.

Well, I guess not all of us interested in this topic were involved in
the Ada95 standardisation effort or otherwise privy to the discussions
which led up to the exclusion of the feature of our delight.

Coming from a C/C++ background I have had a hard time to adjust to
many of the Ada features (geez, I have never casted so much before in
my programming life). All in all I have gone native. Ada is my sole
programming language today - well I like to make life difficult :-).
Still, there are some things I have a problem to adjust to. One is 
P(X) instead of the popular X.P notation. I do understand that in 
Ada83 the only way to derive a type was to use 'is new' and that it
seemed natural to follow the same notation for tagged types. Though,
I still prefer the X.P notation and believe it could have been 
integrated into Ada95 in a reasonably clean manner - oh yes, I have
read the Rationale on this and it sounds hollow and thin to me.

But it is not a question of only these big and 'religious' questions.
E.g. I can not understand why one cannot have an anonymous access
argument which refers to a constant, e.g P(X : access CONSTANT XT).
Why not? What ever could have been said against this? Premature?

So please let us keep on 'BS'ing on our favourite issues irregardless
if Robert Dewar tells us to 'shut up'. It would be more fun if Robert
and others who have been involved in the standardisation process for
Ada95 either said we excluded/included this feature because of this or
that or perhaps say we overlooked that feature.

Sorry for wasting the bandwidth,

/jonas

PS Perhaps Robert's postings would be more productive if

> a lot of suggestions simply reflecting a lack of understanding of
> how Ada 95 can be used to solve the problems. At least 5 years needs

they actually told us how DS