From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.8 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_DATE autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,37ed89588a753b4c X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 1994-10-19 04:24:29 PST Path: bga.com!news.sprintlink.net!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!pipex!uunet!gwu.edu!gwu.edu!not-for-mail From: mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: ARPA still undermining Ada Date: 17 Oct 1994 10:35:46 -0400 Organization: George Washington University Message-ID: <37u242$j9t@felix.seas.gwu.edu> References: <37egd5$2vt@chnews.intel.com> <37hcg9$g3e@louie.udel.edu> <37ib3r$314@gnat.cs.nyu.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: 128.164.9.3 Date: 1994-10-17T10:35:46-04:00 List-Id: In article <37ib3r$314@gnat.cs.nyu.edu>, Robert Dewar wrote: >Mark, I couldn't agree more that it would have made sense for ARPA to fund >a GNAT-like effort earlier. I flew down to Washington a couple of times >a few years ago (i.e. several years before the GNAT work finally started) >to try to sell this idea, but it didn't fly. We have Chris Anderson to >thank for finally seeing that this was an important target of opportunity. > Yes indeed. I was, of course, well outside all those discussions, but to this outsider's eyes, this was an inspired and courageous move on Chris Anderson's part. To this day, some of the Ada vendors complain about GNAT as "unfair competition." Clearly those vendors have no clue about what it really takes to build grass roots support for a language and get it widely propagated. A full-bore implementation of Ada/Ed (with some tools, maybe even a code generator or two, and some support for ongoing maintenance) would, IMHO, have made a big difference if it had happened, say, around 1989 or so. And speaking of Arcadia/UCI, I don't think it's ever been explained why work on their very nice Ada interpretive environment, Arcturus, was stopped just when it seemed to be on the verge of research and educational usefulness. I assume it was a change in direction of the ARPA sponsors, but then one wants to ask _why_. That would have been a dynamite system. A similar system, ACE (Ada Compilation Environment) was done by (I guess) Unisys (or whatever they were called at the time) as a STARS project, also ARPA-funded, and _that_ was halted just as it was about to be useful for similar purposes. No public statement has ever been made on the reason for this. Is it part of the ARPA ideology to see these projects through to the 90% point and hen cut them off? There's a _lot_ of potentially good stuff that was allowed to wither for lack of sustained support. Mike Feldman ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Michael B. Feldman - chair, SIGAda Education Working Group Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science The George Washington University - Washington, DC 20052 USA 202-994-5919 (voice) - 202-994-0227 (fax) - mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Internet) "Non illegitimi carborundum." (Don't let the bastards grind you down.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------