Re: Ada Book

[mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)]

In article <ichbiah.199.2F29C44C@jdi.tiac.net>,
Jean D. Ichbiah <ichbiah@jdi.tiac.net> wrote:

>Mike, You will never cease to surprise me: A book written by the
>authors will have a good chance to convey the SPIRIT of the language.
>This is certainly what myself and my colleagues tried to do in the
>the 1983 Ada Rationale.  In spite of many talentuous followers,
>I still consider it (modestly as usual) as one of the bests ever written
>on Ada.

Naturally, mileages vary. I agree that the Rationale was an excellent
document for conveying the spirit of Ada. Had it been completed and
published somewhere in the neighborhood of 1983, it would have been
recognized more widely for what it was. It helped me a lot. On the
other hand, I was working from an underground copy. Final publication
did not occur till 1986 (or was it 1987), and even then one had to know
where to get it. It never appeared commercially, and it was a couple
more years (the exact date fails me) before it turned up electronically 
on the AJPO machine.

>>(2) K&R was written (originally) before the C standard existed, so
>>    people had to rely on it not just for a quick intro but for a
>>    definitive statementon how the language works. This did not happen
>>    with Ada, as the standard existed before most of the texts did.

>You are certainly weak on history (indeed, your own book credits
>Pascal to Wirth, and Ada ... to the DoD!):  When the 1983 standard
>appeared, there were more than 30 books already on the market.

Yes, that is true. My own book credits not a text but the definitive
document. Indeed there were many texts available before the standard,
but none had the authority for Ada that K&R had for C. As I said above,
the Rationale might have been such an authoritative book, but  it was
more-or-less overtaken by events before the masses knew it existed.

(All you folks out there in Ada-land: Honk if you have a copy of the 
Rationale on your shelf.)

It is also the case that the Rationale cannot be read in isolation from
the LRM, except to get the "flavor" of the language. It is far too
incomplete to serve as an authoritative _text_, which is what K&R was.
(And, indeed, what Wegner was, for all the religious objections to
its coding style.)

>Peter Wegner managed to produce a Fortran introduction written in
>Ada: overlooking completely the issue of readability, sticking to single
>letter identifiers (at times, generously allowing two letters), and full of 
>vague terminology. John Goodenough and myself were so frightened
>by the prospect that the first book on Ada would be so bad that we spent
>long hours with Peter trying  to correct it. But he wanted to be first in 
>print over anything else.  Let  that book rest in peace.

Such things are, of course, a matter of taste. The original questioner
asked if there was an equivalent to K&R for Ada. IMHO, Wegner is the
nearest equivalent. It turned me on to Ada, in 1980. Indeed, he was
first. His book has surely been overtaken by events, but he was there
when we needed him.

Mike Feldman