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From: sdl@linus.UUCP (Steven D. Litvintchouk)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: Ada vs. LISP
Message-ID: <46280@linus.UUCP>
Date: 12 Mar 89 16:22:52 GMT
References: <6125@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> <4624@hubcap.UUCP> <6153@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> <7682@venera.isi.edu> <45978@linus.UUCP>
Organization: The MITRE Corp., Bedford, MA
In-reply-to: eachus@mbunix.mitre.org's message of 6 Mar 89 16:52:26 GMT
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


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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