Re: Good Design Strategies <Was comments on comments>

[billwolf@hubcap.clemson.edu (William Thomas Wolfe,2847,)]

   [Due to the Followup-To, this article didn't make it to
    comp.lang.ada, although it obviously should have... Bill]

From: rsimonian@x102c.harris-atd.com (Simonian RP 66449)
>>
>>      Software Productivity Solutions, Inc., has announced a new product,
>>      Classic-Ada (tm), which allows Ada software developers to use
>>      inheritance and dynamic binding in object-oriented Ada designs.
>
>You mean that they sell a *super-set* of ADA?
>
>Mild sarcasm on:
>This must be what we all have been waiting for !
>Mild sarcasm off.
>
>ADA is too much of an elephant already. I totally agree that
>inheritance is good but ADA would have to be pruned a lot
>before something new should be added to it.

Classic-Ada is *NOT* a super-set of Ada.  Harris has also developed a
tool, called InnovAda, for true object-oriented programming in Ada 
(multiple-inheritance, dynamic binding, run-time message evaluation,
and so on).  Such tools generate compilable Ada code; if you wanted to,
you could have created the same code generated by the tool.  InnovAda
and similar tools are preprocessors which enhance productivity by giving
the designer/programmer a powerful development and maintenance environment.
There are graphic design tools on the market which do some amount of
code generation; would you consider those to be supersets of Ada?

InnovAda and other object-oriented preprocessors still provide one with
all the nice features of Ada, plus they supplement the language with the
advantages of true object-oriented design.  I have found these capabilities
to be indispensable for several problem domains; particularly when one
tries to implement Artificial Intelligence in Ada.



Richard P. Simonian     407/984-6006
Natural Language Processing Group
Harris GISD, Melbourne, FL  32902             
Internet: rsimonian@x102c@trantor.harris-atd.com