Re: Other Ada Standards (was Re: SIGada Conference)

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

The cost would *not* be near zero. Someone has to first work out all the 
legality rules and specify them in appropriate legalese for the ARM. 
Someone has to review and debate the new rules & test it against other 
rules to make sure it doesn't intercourse anything up. Someone has to go 
out and change every compiler that is currently being maintained, test 
it adequately to make sure it still works and then shepard it through 
validation. Someone has to write the validation suite - complete with 
cases that must be rejected by the compiler - not just ones that work. 
Someone has to argue that their compiler really did pass the suite with 
someone who has to argue that it didn't. Etc., etc., etc.

There is (as I'm sure you are aware) a whole lot of effort that goes 
into *any* language feature - no matter how seemingly trivial. Some of 
it is by volunteers - but that doesn't stop it from *costing* something. 
Volunteers will only "volunteer" for so much before they tell you to go 
pile sand. All these resources need to be used wisely.

That's why I think that given the cost of making some change like this, 
the money/time would better be spent on getting some feature that would 
make more of a difference to more people. Adding new library features 
doesn't involve compiler mods - just writing and validating the library. 
(Still a big job, but you didn't shake up a working compiler and have to 
prove it still works.) Hence I believe we'd get more useful stuff for 
the same input of effort.

MDC


Robert A Duff wrote:
> 
> This change is hard to evaluate: the cost is near zero, and the benefit
> is also near zero, so the cost/benefit ratio is difficult to estimate.
> I've seen many such cases over the years, and I'd guess they usually
> lose.


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