Re: FW: Is the Writing on the Wall for Ada?

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

Except that you still have the problem of expanding the validation. 
Every package you add to the ARM needs sufficient documentation of 
behavior to make it validatable - and *then* you've got to go write 
tests to prove that someone's compiler did the job right and **then** 
someone has to run all that validation and make sure it passes. The 
costs keep multiplying and pretty soon the vendors are howling because 
you're driving them into bankruptcy. Adding stuff to the ARM is 
difficult, costly and slow. I'd prefer not to add things to the ARM that 
don't involve some structural change to the language (syntax/semantics 
of the language itself.) Packages that can be implemented totally within 
the syntax/semantics of Ada are best dealt with in other ways.

Add *LOTS* of packages to Ada and make it more useful and convenient. 
Let's just do it in a less formal way so that we don't kill the vendors 
with implementation/validation effort. A Conventional Ada Library would 
accomplish this.

MDC



Wes Groleau wrote:
> 
> If the IO packages all have the same "shape"
> then they should not require a lot of extra
> text.
> 
> I see no point in having several pages that
> are identical except for part of the type name.
> (There's already too much of that in the child
> packages of Ada.Text_IO and in Wide_String routines
> repeating the text for String routines.)
> 
> If they don't have the same "shape" then it
> adds complexity to learning the language.
> 
> It always bugged me that IO for some data types is
> Get() and Put() but for others it's Read() and Write().
> 


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