Re: Unusual syntax

[Mark Biggar <mark.a.biggar@attbi.com>]

Marin David Condic wrote:
> 
> Ahhh The bureaucracy that comes with the military. :-) I really don't know
> what sort of "Official" status Ada80 had - except that a) nobody built any
> compilers to that standard (at least not any that got any sort of widespread
> circulation) and b) my recollection of the intent was that it was never
> supposed to serve as some sort of "final" standard by which people should be
> guided in developing compilers. The intent was that it was to be reviewed,
> commented on and eventually revised, so in a sense it was never a "real"
> standard. Clearly, for paperwork purposes, it was given a number and maybe
> in some bureaucratic sense it was therefore an "Official" standard - but for
> practical purposes it wasn't used that way.

Some more history: The DOD let out 4 contracts for designing the
language that would later be called Ada.  The 4 language specs were
given the names Red, Blue, Yellow and Green and set out to a panel
of "Distinguished Reviewers" for comment.  The result of that was that
Red and Green were selected for further development.  Eventually
Green was chosen and named Ada.  This is why copies of the Ada 
standard are traditionally printed with green covers.  MIL-STD-1815 
or Ada80 was basically an unchanged version of the final Green spec.
After some more review and comment, a finalized version of the Ada
language spec was released as Ada83 or MIL-STD-1815A.

--
Mark Biggar
mark.a.biggar@attbi.com