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From: "Arthur G. Duncan" <aduncan@global2000.net>
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Subject: Re: A simple question: is there anything in Ada like STL in C++
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Date: 2001-07-03T02:13:20+00:00
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David C. Hoos, Sr. wrote:
> 
> Strange as it may seem, the STL actually had its origins in Ada.  The
> work was headed p by Professor David Musser at Rensselaer
> Polytechnic Institute, and the work used to be published on the Web.
> 
> It now seems to have disappeared.

The work was called the Ada Generic Library and was carried by
Alex Stepanov and Dave Musser, while Musser was still at the
GE Research and Development Center in Schenectady, New York.
Stepanov, at the time, was teaching at the Polytechnic University
in Brooklyn. Stepanov also worked at GE-CR&D before going to
Polytechnic.

The library consisted of a number of generic list processing 
algorithms. The work was published by Springer in 1989
(ISBN 0-387-97133-5).

The work grew out of some of Stepanov's work on Higher Order
Programming in Scheme, which he had developed at the Polytechnic
University. In Scheme Stepanov used higher-order functions (i.e.,
functions that accepted functions as arguments and returned functions
as their result) to generate the list algorithm implementations.
In Ada, Musser and Stepanov used generics, since Ada does not
support higher-order functions (at least not directly).

A side note.  Some of these implementations used up to six levels
of generic instantiation, which was sufficient to break most of
the commercial Ada compilers available at that time.

For something more like the STL in Ada, there is a paper by
Erlingsson and Konstantinou (1996), describing some work aimed at
providing an Ada analogue of the STL. This work was done at
R.P.I. under the direction of Dave Musser.

Hope this helps

Regards,

- Art Duncan
  NYS-HESC
  Adjunct Professor, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute