Re: Ada vs. LISP

[sdl@linus.UUCP (Steven D. Litvintchouk)]

In article <45978@linus.UUCP> eachus@mbunix.mitre.org (Robert Eachus) writes:

>     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....
>      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.

Now how about Simula-67?  If only you had applied the same requirement
to translating Simula-67 programs to Ada, perhaps Ada might have
supported subclassing/inheritance better than it does!  Seems like a
missed opportunity....

In fact, the significance of Simula-67's class mechanism appears to
have been overlooked by nearly everyone connected with the DoD HOL
initiative--was it ever seriously considered for inclusion in
Steelman?  Or did they conclude (mistakenly) that types accomplished
exactly the same thing?


Steven Litvintchouk
MITRE Corporation
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