Re: Standard Library Interest?

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

Well, yes, that's pretty much compatible with the idea I've been putting 
forward. If you have some group or organization overseeing some 
updatable library, people could contribute what they thought would be 
useful. The organization could arrive at some decision about its 
suitability and include it if it seemed to warrant it. (They would be 
playing the job of "Editor/Publisher" - work with a developer to get 
something suitable and add it to the next scheduled release as deemed 
necessary. That's how you'd resolve style issues and other things you 
might care about, like documentation.) You'd have a release cycle with 
sufficient frequency to give the language a means of rapidly reacting to 
a changing world without locking something into the ARM that might prove 
to be a "Bad Idea" or unstable or unproven. You get a more market-driven 
language capability without absolute standardization (the ARM) or 
absolute chaos (grabbing random libraries from the Internet.)

If the vendors are on board with it, they pick up new releases and 
distribute them with their compilers. They'd have the final say about 
what they wanted to accept. They'd be responsible if there were any 
portability issues to resolve. (Hopefully, few.) Ultimately pieces that 
are added might or might not make it into the ARM, but so what? You've 
got source code and if you like it, you use it with some guarantee that 
it is common across implementations. I don't see how this is 
undesirable. You get more functionality in a portable and standard way. 
Long term, it may be an ARM feature if it is popular and stable enough.

MDC


Stephane Richard wrote:
> 
> Well yes 10 years is a long time....We'd need something like the Linux
> system. By that I mean.  Some one develops a new thing, suggests it to
> makers of Ada (like in linux they give it to the makers of linux) for
> acceptance into the next release (which typically doesn't take 10 years in
> most cases).  by the end of 10 years if enough makers of Ada have it as part
> of their compiler then the revision can't overlook it.  if it's that popular
> aside some terminology changes (say you didn't use the underscore in your
> names and Ada guidelines recommend you should, etc etc).  then it gets added
> into the next revision.....
> 
> I do agree that 10 years is a very long time and that might be part of the
> reason which slows down Ada's progress on the popularity charts.  it's
> strength (truely standard language) is also it's qeakness (way too long
> revision period).  I would say either the revisions need to be closer
> together (a year max instead of 10 years) or allow a principle of ammendment
> to the standard that could be revised periodically and whatever makes it to
> that revision would be part of the "official revisison".  or some system so
> that we dont have to wait that long.
> 
> hence the standard commity either need to be more present and accessible to
> the Ada community, or form a team of members or non members that could do
> this regular interval thing.
> 


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Marin David Condic
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