Re: Early Ada Mistakes

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

Sure. But if there had been some recognition of the need to have a 
subset, perhaps there could have been a lower-level standard that would 
have allowed Janus to call itself "Ada" and perhaps met the needs of 
some larger market segment.

I thought the biggest flaw in there was having to kludge up something to 
get Text_IO to work. Perhaps today, with the 'Image and 'Value 
attributes, there could have been something that would have worked with 
simple subprogram calls rather than generics. That would have made it 
easier to develop a standard, portable, upward-compatible subset of Ada 
that included the things one would normally expect of Pascal or C or 
Fortran. It could have been a competitor for those languages at its 
outset and held forth the promise of more to come as technology improved.

Water under the bridge though - and no way to prove or disprove the 
theory. Still, the lesson ought to be "If the vendors are going to end 
up doing it anyway, better to get them doing it all in the same way 
through some sort of recognized standard."

MDC


Wes Groleau wrote:
> Marin David Condic wrote:
> 
>> 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
> 
> 
> That's why they called it "Janus" instead of "Ada"
> 


-- 
======================================================================
Marin David Condic
I work for: http://www.belcan.com/
My project is: http://www.jsf.mil/NSFrames.htm

Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ a c m . o r g

     "All reformers, however strict their social conscience,
      live in houses just as big as they can pay for."

          --Logan Pearsall Smith
======================================================================