Re: status of Ada STL?

[Richard Riehle <richard@adaworks.com>]

Randy Brukardt wrote:

> There is an open AI for container libraries for Ada 200Y. The problem
> is, everyone is willing to write an interesting library, but there is
> much less enthusism for the hard work it takes to make something
> suitable for standardization. (Compare the documentation for the typical
> library with the RM for Ada.Strings.Fixed, and you'll see what I mean).
> Then, compound that with getting everyone to agree on the requirements
> and the solution...

I seem to recall that George Bernard Shaw wrote, "If you layed all the
economists in the world end-to-end, you will wouldn't reach a conclusion."

I think the same is true if you lay all the programmers end-to-end,
especially
when trying to get agreement on something as subject to variation of
intepretation as standard libraries.

Perhaps, before commiting anything to code, in any language, we should be
discussing the underlying architecture for this kind of standard library.
Yes,
I realize that language structure is an important consideration, and that
linguistic continuity is largely influenced by programming language
structure.
However,  there may be enough architectural issues to permit discussion of
this
at a slightly higher level of abstraction.

This suggestion is not meant to deprecate the work that has already been
represented in source code.  In fact, that work is an important contribution

to raising the discussion to the next higher level of abstraction.

Richard Riehle