Early Ada Mistakes (was: Re: += in ada)

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

Wes Groleau wrote:
 > Marin David Condic wrote:
 >
 >> which to run the compilers and nobody was willing to "subset" the
 >> language to get some portion of it working reliably & efficiently
 >> in a
 >
 > Janus was willing.  I had a copy runnable on a CP/M 64 K machine.
 > Never did anything with it.
 >
I owned one of those too for a PC. Also the Telesoft compiler. Both couldn't
figure out how to get generics implemented, so they ended up with
butt-ugly, non-portable kludges in order to make something vaguely
resembling Text_IO work. Eventually, this got fixed, but, as I observed,
it put people off and made them believe that all the promises were just
hype - that Ada *was* just to big and complicated and inefficient and
would never meet its promises of portability.

BTW, I liked the RR product, so please don't throw stones at me Randy!
However, I don't have anything nice to say about Telesoft - mostly for
bad business practices - so those guys are free to go pile sand. Except
they don't exist anymore. Wonder why? ;-)

As for subsets - that was viewed as heresy at the time. Nobody official
wanted to sanction a subset and most of the potential users didn't seem
to want there to be one. In point of fact, subsets got made anyway, but
there was no "conventional" subset anyone could count on and there were
non-portabilities (as I observed with Text_IO). This ought to be a 
"Lesson Learned" - if the vendors are going to end up doing it anyway, 
then its better to accommodate it in some manner so it gets done in a 
*standard* way.

I thought it would be A Good Thing(tm) had there been some kind of
semi-official subset that could have been validated so that a compiler
might have been "Level 1 Compliant". That may have let compiler writers
come out with something that would have met the needs of us guys with
really small target processors and/or inexpensive home computers. We
would have been able to play the game and do so in a way that was
"Portable". As technology improved, vendors might have more easily
become "Level 2 Compliant" and customers could have upgraded as their
hardware grew to meet the needs.

But that's all 20/20 hindsight. Perhaps if we get to have *another* DoD
mandated programming language.... :-)


 >

 >> The value of strong typing in particular was not seen as "user
 >> friendly". They tried to write "Adatran" code and found it
 >> difficult. So
 >
 >
 > And people on the other extreme, who thought that just because the
 > language offered something, you had to use it.
 >

Yup. You still see that today and not just with Ada. People go off and take
a course and get all hyped up about some particular set of features and
have to run off and make use of each and every one in their first program.

We still occasionally see religious wars here over the use of standard
("Predefined" - Sorry Robert.) Integer and Float types. Some folks
believe it is morally wrong under any circumstances *not* to define your
own types for every conceivable use. Others are more lax about it.

I'm in the "Others" category, but I did learn a lesson about not using
the predefined type Integer in an embedded machine where later, when we
needed to meet requirements to guarantee saturation on overflows, I was
unable to override the "+" (etc) operators. Had I defined my own integer
type, I could have done this. Fortunately, it wasn't too hard to review
the code and determine that we were O.K. without it & get waivers from
the requirement.



 > I remember one program that had 26 tasks when given to me.  When I
 > was done with it, it had five, and still met all its requirements.
 >
I recall one that was built by the Special Olympics Software Development
Team at a company that shall remain nameless. They had been sent off to
Object Oriented Programming School (on the Short Bus) and came back and
turned *everything* into a task. As well you can imagine, this
complicated analysis of program behavior immensely. It could have been
done a hell of a lot simpler, but, well, they *were* the Special
Olympics Software Development Team. :-)

MDC

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Marin David Condic
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