Re: Ada Book

[dobrien@seas.gwu.edu (David O'Brien)]

Michael Feldman (mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu) wrote:
: >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.)

I hate to admit it, but I have a copy of the underground draft I
photocopied from a co-worker in 1991.  [wonder if I surprised Prof.
Feldman w/this one :-))]

Anyway, my two cents...  Not only was K&R the authoritative text on the
language, but so was the pcc compiler from Bell Labs.  Where the book
was thin, you try the compiler.  Where the two differed you went with
the compiler -- for portability and to see the latest thinking in the C
language as it evolved and K&R got outdated.  C wasn't the only language
like this, I believe Pascal was the same.  Eiffel, Sather and LISP
certainly are.  Ada may in fact be one of the few languages in which
there was a standard so early in its life.  All other languages I can
think of except for maybe Algol-6{0,8}, evolved through implementations
before it was even considered to standardize them.

One nice thing about Ada (I believe) was that the standard was out
before there were any/many implementations.  Thus everyone was playing
from the same sheet of music.  In a way this was bad though.  I believe
the language designers would have gotten a little insight by first
implementing an Ada compiler before unleashing that job to others.  I
may be wrong, but an Ada compiler can be *quite* hard to implement and
wasn't that way it has taken so long to get good compilers (especially on
small machines like the PC and Mac).

-- David O'Brien	(dobrien@seas.gwu.edu)