Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

["Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz" <nospam@gsg.eds.com>]

Robert Dewar wrote:
> 
>   I don't think unnnecessary terseness was the issue here, but rather
>   the sacrifice of informal readability to precision and accuracy. There
>   were VERY rarely any arguments about what the defining document said
>   or meant, and very very few errors were found (though of course you
>   could argue that it was never widely used compared to say Ada).

The lack of arguments tells nothing about whether the document was too
terse.
It does, of course, tell us that it was unambiguous.
 
>   But the definining document is no less accessible than say the COBOL
>   standard in my view, and had the advantage that implementors at least
>   could exactly understand what it said, and easily find anything they
>   wanted there. 

While I hate, loathe and despise COBOL, the original document from
CODASYL
defined its terms in an easily accessible fashion.

>   Yes, it required some effort to understand, but that
>   is true of any formal definition (by comparison, the Ada standard is
>   an informal definition at best).

No, it is not true of any formal definition; only of definitions that
are not
properly annotated. The "vienna telephone directory" (reports on the
Vienna 
Definition Language and it's use in defining PL/I) are quite formal, but
they 
include enough annotation to guide the reader.
 
>   The problem is that formal definitions are indeed very much inaccessible
>   to those without the skills in reading documents of the type. 

My degree is in Mathematics. Papers in professional jounals are expected
to
be quite technical, but if you submitted a paper ot the AMS or the MAA
with 
just mathematical formulae and no explanatory narrative, the editors
would
bounce it right back to you.

>   No amount
>   of informal explanation would have helped people to read the Algol-68
>   RR if they did not have the necessary mathematical background to be
>   comfortable with a highly formal style of presentation.

True, but irrelevant. No degree of mathematical background will make it
easy
to read text that is deliberately obscure. There is a difference between
formal and turgid, and the ALGOL-68 report was far harder to read than
other
language documents that were every bit as formal.
> 
>   Indeed in the UK, Algol-68 was widely used, 

Indeed, I cited Eurepe in general when I disputed the claim that ALGOL
68 was dead.

> Seymour said
> 
>   SPITBOL is basically SNOBOL 4 with a few minor things stripped out; it
>   is quite different from Icon. I understand that there is a SPITBOL for
>   the PC from Catspaw.
> 
> Robert replies
> 
>   Not quite, they are dialects. Spitbol leaves out a couple of the most
>   dynamic features of SNOBOL4 that are rarely used (e.g. the ability
>   to distinguish between names and values dynamically in pathological
>   cases), 

AS I said, minor things. In my experience, students rarely needed the
missing
features and prefered SPITBOL over SNOBOL 4 due to the improved
performance.

BTW, is the Catspav version still available for the PC?

-- 

                        Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
                        Senior Software SE

The values in from and reply-to are for the benefit of spammers:
reply to domain eds.com, user msustys1.smetz or to domain gsg.eds.com,
user smetz.