Re: Ada2005

[Carsten Freining <freining@informatik.uni-jena.de>]

Hello Peter,

I think Ada95 needs a very urgent revision.

1. There are many things that have been overtaken by Ada83 and can be
removed now. Since everybody knew it would be removed no new software should
rely on it.

Another point is the use of unicode characters in identifiers.

2. There are many problems that have been created by Ada95.

Best example is the object oriented part, because it is not possible to have
constants as components. There are no real bindings between methods (or
procedures) and the belonging class. It is just a package.

And there is still the fixed length String. I don't think it is neccessary.
It would be better to have only the bounded-length string. For downwards
compatibility they both can still be available, but I think it is an ancient
thing to still have a fixed length String were only String with exactly the
same length can be assigned.

These are only the examples coming to my mind reading, that Ada95 needs no
revision. There are many more (it is just hard to put them together in a
couple of minutes). We went through the rational and compared the stuff
there with the Standard and we found many things, where ada 95 has been
behind all other techniques right from the start.

Since I work at the university, teaching students about programming
languages, I have to state, that it is not possible, to use the standard in
education. You can only use a subset of Ada, because most things are not
understandable for students, especially in the beginning of their studies. I
think only to make the standard more clear it is neccessary to go through
the standard and make important changes to clearify it.

Greetings,

Carsten Freining.

Peter Hermann schrieb:

> Peter Hermann <ica2ph@iris16.csv.ica.uni-stuttgart.de> wrote:
> > What about fixing it to Ada2005?
>
> some clarification:
>
> Ada9X was called in this way, because the X=5 was not known before.
>
> Every industry standard has to be revised every 10 years (ISO).
>
> The current Ada95 standard is excellent enough to not needing
> urgent revision.
>
> --
> --Peter Hermann(49)0711-685-3611 fax3758 ica2ph@csv.ica.uni-stuttgart.de
> --Pfaffenwaldring 27 Raum 114, D-70569 Stuttgart Uni Computeranwendungen
> --http://www.csv.ica.uni-stuttgart.de/homes/ph/
> --Team Ada: "C'mon people let the world begin" (Paul McCartney)