Re: PL/SQL -> Ada

[Bill Meahan <wmeahan@wa8tzg.org>]

"Marin D. Condic" wrote:
> 

> I suppose that the reason such tutorials/papers are not available is
> because it takes someone with A) experience in both languages, b) time
> and skills to write such material, c) a desire to advocate Ada to "the
> masses" and d) contacts within the PL/SQL community to spread the word.
> Kind of makes it hard to find someone to sign up for the job, eh? :-)
> 
> I would imagine that if you were to write a sort of
> "Pascal-Subset-Intro-To-Ada-For-PL/SQL-Programmers" paper, we could find
> an appropriate website to put it on.
> 


I think you miss my point: PL/SQL **is** Ada. Well, not really, but it
_is _cobbled from Ada83 (they left a lot of the good stuff out). Hence
an PL/SQL programmer _already_ knows a subset of Ada, probably without
ever realizing it. Oracle seems to have gone to great lengths to not
mention the derivation and only a handful of 3rd-party Oracle texts even
make a passing reference to PL/SQL's origins let alone expound on them.

At the risk of being repetitious: It's not that Ada interfaces well with
SQL (in general), it's that thopusands of Oracle programmers are already
using what amounts to (a piece of) Ada83. So why no effort to expand on
that base?

BTW, at a PL/SQL session of Oracle OpenWorld last November, I asked the
celebrity PL/SQL author, who is really well connected to Oracle's PL/SQL
team and who actually mentions Ada in his books, if, given Oracle 8i's
object features, we could expect some Ada95-isms in future versions of
PL/SQL. He looked at me as if I were from Alpha Centauri, choked, and
said, "No." 


-- 
Bill Meahan WA8TZG    wmeahan@wa8tzg.org
Cro-magnon woodworker. Unix Bigot. Perl fan. Oracle weenie.
Managing software development is like herding cats.