Re: The International standard paper on Ada !!

[Marin David Condic <condicma@bogon.pwfl.com>]

Ted Dennison wrote:

> Typically that won't happen, as selling the standards is about the only
> source of income ISO has. But often folks make draft versions of the
> standards available. For example, a late draft version of the C++
> standard is available at
> http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/cpp/pub/wp/html/cd2/
>

Oh, I don't object to ISO trying to make a buck. Somebody has to pay the
bills, right? I just think that even a relatively low price still acts as a
barrier to learning and using the language. You'll have people with casual
curiosity or a one-shot question who won't want to pay just for a quick
peek. There are college students without much money who will be inhibited.
There are corporate rules that make it difficult for me to get reimbursed
for shelling out cash for a document or book I think I need - Sure, I could
pay for it out of my own pocket, but that has a way of adding up to
non-trivial cash after a while and why should I do that when its a benefit
for the company? I'm sure you can think up even more reasons why "free" is
better than "cheap".

The ability to download the Ada standard in .PS format has helped me with
teaching my in-house Ada class. Many of my students are curious enough to
want to learn more on their own so I let them borrow books off of my shelf &
I get them their own personalized print-out of the standard so they can
refer to it while studying. The on-line hypertext version is also useful to
them when they've got a quick question about some feature.

>
> There's also a C9X effort ( http://www.c9x.org/ ) which contains a draft
> version of the next C standard. But the text there implies it will not
> be made available after the standard is approved. Of course they are
> running out of time for "9X". :-)
>
> Hmm. I also find it quite intriguing that their webpage has a picture of
> a lemming on it. :-)

I'm brushing up on C and learning C++ in anticipation of needing these
skills as I go about looking for a new job. Its been a couple of years since
I've had to do anything in C and I guess as time passes, one tends to forget
about all the pain that goes with it. As I plow through the C++ book, I keep
asking myself "Why would anybody do this if they weren't being forced to?"
The only answer I can come up with is that there is a huge mound of
available resources to go with it, so you live with screwy pointer
references to everything and the null terminated strings and all the
obfuscating operator symbols because this is the way you get at all the GUI
builders, debuggers, databases, OS calls, etc. etc, etc.

I know Ada has the ability to do most or all of what you can do with C++ in
terms of interfacing to all those spiffy tools, but it still lacks a nice,
full up, one-stop-shopping, kit where you get the whole ball of wax in one
shot. Sure, you can pull things together from a variety of sources and get
the same capabilities, but that's difficult and tends to force you to be
spending time fooling with the toolset rather than moving the mission
forward. And even if you had the integrated toolset, it wouldn't be doing
things "The Ada Way" - you'd be writing Ada++ code. (For example: I think
callbacks from a GUI are a kludge when you've got a language that will do
tasking.)

Granted, we've made advances, but C/C++ continue to sell IMHO more because
of the infrastructure than because of technical superiority.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Real Time & Embedded Systems, Propulsion Systems Analysis
United Technologies, Pratt & Whitney, Large Military Engines
M/S 731-95, P.O.B. 109600, West Palm Beach, FL, 33410-9600
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