From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.2 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID, REPLYTO_WITHOUT_TO_CC autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,7f9a81eff4e45469,start X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: munck@Reston.UnisysGSG.COM (Bob Munck) Subject: Opportunity for Ada Date: 1995/04/05 Message-ID: <4436.797119401@blackbird>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 100939372 sender: nobody@cs.utexas.edu organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway reply-to: munck@STARS.Reston.UnisysGSG.COM newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1995-04-05T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Friends, There may be an excellent opportunity RIGHT NOW to make Ada much more widely-used by non-military, non-government programmers. Sun has just announced a significant enhancement to the capabilities of the World Wide Web called HotJava, essentially a C++ equivalent of the old UCSD Pascal P-System. If we could make Ada available as an alternative to C++ in this system, it might become very widely used very quickly. As with the P-System, HotJava is basically a compiler that produces code meant to be interpreted. The idea is that WWW browsers will include an interpreter, so that WWW servers can send out executable programs that cannot (!!) violate client security because they are interpreted. The programs will be able to animate the display, handle user input, and generally do a number of things that will make the user interface much richer and more interesting. Sun has written such a browser, and distributes it for free. Among the demonstrations that they provide are an animation of several sorting algorithms, a tic-tac-toe game, mixed animation and music displays, and a simple 3D output package that lets you rotate wire-frame objects in three-space with your mouse. My suggestion is obvious: retarget GNAT to the HotJava interpretable code. Sun seems to have taken liberties with the C++ "standard" already, and there are messages on their mailing list saying "As long as we're changing C++, let's change the following 321 features, all of which I really hate!" A usable Ada alternative could be grabbed by everybody out there doing WWW stuff (potentially a great many people) who doesn't like C++. For much more detail and a copy of the HotJava browser, see http://java.sun.com/ My apologies if this has already been brought up; my main newsfeed and all three alternative news sources available to me are simultaneously down. If you respond, please email me a copy. My ulterior motive: I'll probably be doing a lot of HotJava programming, and I don't want to have to learn C and C++. Bob munck@interramp.com munck@STARS.Reston.UnisysGSG.COM