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From: eachus@mbunix.mitre.org (Robert Eachus)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.software-eng
Subject: Ada vs. LISP
Summary: Ada can
Keywords: Ada LISP
Message-ID: <45978@linus.UUCP>
Date: 6 Mar 89 16:52:26 GMT
References: <6125@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> <4624@hubcap.UUCP> <6153@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> <7682@venera.isi.edu>
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Reply-To: eachus@mbunix (Robert I. Eachus)
Organization: The MITRE Corporation, Bedford, Mass.
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

In article <7682@venera.isi.edu> raveling@vaxb.isi.edu (Paul Raveling) writes:
>In article <6153@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> rjh@cs.purdue.EDU (Bob Hathaway) writes:
>>...  Ada was designed to standardize software and it
>>could replace almost any language with exceptions being rare.
>
>	Have you suggested that to a hard-core LISP user lately?
>
>Paul Raveling
>Raveling@isi.edu

     One of the things which I did during the ANSI standardization of
Ada was to look for ANYTHING in the standard which would make
translation of LISP programs into Ada difficult.  There were a few
problems in the early drafts, but they were all eliminated by the
final draft.  As one of the problems for the AdaCan contest I proposed
writing a compatiblity package to allow transliterated Common LISP to
be compiled by any Ada compiler.  (There are certain LISP lexical
conventions that are incompatible with Ada, but they are easily dealt
with: 'a --> QUOTE(A).)  

     The problem was eliminated from the final list as too easy, but I
still recieved two proposed solutions from LISP and Ada programers I
showed the writeup to!  Not only can you write AdaLISP, but some
people already do.  Incidently, AdaLISP does look a lot like LISP with
the primary structures being nested fuction calls and aggregates, but
there is no easy way to close lots of scopes, so don't try it without
a good EMACS.

     It seems that everyone has seen AdaTRAN, but few people realize
that the capability to write FORTRAN or COBOL or Pascal or LISP style
programs in Ada was not an accident, it was a deliberate design
requirement.

					Robert I. Eachus

function TWIDDLE_THUMBS (LEFT, RIGHT: THUMB) return THUMBS is
  begin return TWIDDLE_THUMBS(RIGHT, LEFT); end TWIDDLE_THUMBS;