Re: an infinate loop

[Jeffrey Carter <jeffrey.carter@boeing.com>]

Ted Dennison wrote:
> 
> >At the "Ada Launch" (1980 Dec 10), Ichbiah, Barnes, and Firth introduced
> >the recently renamed Ada language (MIL-STD 1815, formerly Green, now
> >known as Ada 80) to the world. They said "while" was in the language
> >primarily to support translation from languages such as Pascal, and
> >advised using the "loop ... exit when" format in new code.
> 
> Interesting. Do you have a reference for this (or perhaps you were there)? It
> seems like rather bad logic, as you can clearly construct any of the other kinds
> of loops with "loop" and "exit". I do remember hearing (second hand. I'm not
> trying to claim I was there either) a quote similar to this about "goto". There
> are those here who would dispute its validity in that context too though.

My first introduction to Ada was watching videotapes of the Ada Launch
presentations by IBF and reading copies of their slides. I have no idea
how you could get this today. They did say that goto was in the language
primarily to support translation from languages such as FORTRAN. Lucky
for the state machine with goto people that they were interested in
supporting translation from other languages.

-- 
Jeffrey Carter