Re: Re-Marketing Ada (was "With and use")

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

Stephane Richard wrote:
> 
> Wish more vendors would read (and understand clearly) this last paragraph of
> yours.  ISO does nothing as far as libraries go.  If we were to do a library
> and submit it to the ISO for inclusion, not sure what would happen then
> since they don't deal with libraries in the first place.  They would
> prpbably have to create something, a sub group or an annotation to the
> standard for libraries or something to do anything about including a
> library. and I'm not sure if they would.
> 
ISO is not the way to go. Any library would have to react too quickly to 
  changes in the world around it and freezing it in a standard would be 
to strangle it. Also, it is difficult to write up verifiable 
requirements such that you could validate against an ISO standard. It 
really isn't the place for it.

If the vendors themselves don't want to distribute it, one could 
conceive of other alternatives for a library, but I *still* think that 
it doesn't gain that "de facto standard" status unless you at least have 
the vendors somehow pointing their customers off to it or have something 
semi-official (like SIGAda) behind it.


> This is like 3rd party vendors for other languages.  they're there, but the
> commercial compilers don't include them per se in their distributions.
> Somebody else manages and sells it.  Not the language makers.  (unless it
> becomes so popular and useful) and this last parenthesis might be what we
> need to aim for.

It would be conceivable that one might start being a library vendor - 
there are small companies that sell C libraries for specialized 
purposes. However, you'd need to look at the economics of it: Is there 
enough Ada out there to make an Ada library a self-sustaining business? 
Especially considering you have no support from the vendors or any 
guarantee that your library gets considered to be the de facto standard. 
  I think that writing it, documenting it and maintaining it would be a 
full-time job for probably more than one guy. So either it has to 
generate enough income to provide that one or more guys with their 
weekly beer budget plus rent, or it needs to be done by the 
independently wealthy philanthropic Ada developers out there who have 
nothing better to do with their time and money.

SIGAda might make a forum for doing it, but I'd think it would need a 
small team that was able to get together frequently to argue it out. It 
also would likely need a little representation from the vendors to gain 
some perspective on what customers might want. That would be a volunteer 
effort so it would take a long time before something got very large, but 
it would at least have some kind of official standing.

MDC




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