Re: += in ada

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

Well, one of the things that was done right with Ada95 was developing 
Gnat and making sure it was out there in Open Source. That gave people 
something that they could use right away and, if the need was there, 
could modify for their own particular targets, etc. Had Ada83 followed 
some similar route, it might have met with more success.

In some ways, I think Ada83 could have succeeded much better if it had 
only been turned into Ada85 - delayed a couple of years to let hardware 
and compiler technology catch up. A descent quality compiler that was 
publically available for some popular and inexpensive platform would 
have gone a *LOT* further back then to help make the language more 
popular. If the DoD had delayed the standard until such a prototype 
compiler could have been released with it, I think that lots of people 
would have tried it and liked it.

One thing to remember is that back then, compilers in general were still 
pretty expensive and hobbyists were just starting to find things like 
Borland Pascal available. Their hardware was pretty small - hard disks 
were quite expensive and lots of systems only had floppies.  I knew 
there were lots of people back then who were excited about Ada and would 
have loved to try it out - perhaps building a lot of the software that 
would have made it more successful - but they were basically frozen out 
of it initially and even when it started to be more practical, the 
quality was poor and sooner or later the discouragement set in and 
people started wandering off to other more accessible technology.

On the up-side, I noticed that there were a hundred-thirty-something 
posts to CLA this morning - a pretty big number. Maybe it reflects some 
increased interest in Ada? Or is it all just a flurry of 
thrusts-jabs-ripostes by the usual suspects? ;-)

MDC


Robert I. Eachus wrote:
> Incidently, I now know enough that I would instead of pages of detailed 
> comments on the proposals I would have made one comment.  "Develop the 
> compiler, then award the contract for the APSE.  Otherwise you will be 
> doomed to failure."  As it is/was, no viable APSE was ever developed 
> back then, although some decent development systems have shown up since.
> 
> At MITRE in the 1980s we had a standard of comparison for all the 
> proposed APSEs.  We compared them to Verdix Ada, SunOS, emacs, and 
> decent support for e-mail.  We never added NFS (network file system) to 
> that list becuase no proposed APSE ever measured up--and the actual 
> implementations were always worse.
> 


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Marin David Condic
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