Re: Tucker's interview with TechWorld (2008)

[Georg Bauhaus <rm-host.bauhaus@maps.futureapps.de>]

On 2/4/11 7:31 AM, Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57) wrote:

> Although it's probably very too much soon to think about such things, it happens I try to imagine what would be an Ada successor (that's why keeping track of this old ideas and of the overall history may be worthy in the long run), as much as I sometime try to imagine how many times Ada gonna stay in the place as-is, without a successor… one or two centuries ? (more?)

Random picks from the archives turn up interesting study notes.
One is lsn-048-dr, by Jean D. Ichbiah.   

(If it is not too impolite to speculate about these topics
in public, rumor has had it that one side was favoring the
(typical) working programmer at the cost of not-so-desirable
implementation, which on the other side would have been
considered at least equally important.)

"Syntactic issues are very important for the marketing of a
language and it would be quite regrettable to have postponed their
consideration and find out that it is too late to address them.  The
esthetic appeal can predispose people favorably and do a lot for its
acceptance.  Those who underestimate it often speak of "syntactic
sugaring" as if it were something unimportant, but many semantically
valid languages have failed for lack of charm, for lack of this kind
of appeal that rallies supporters without their being able to explain
why they like it."

Another argument is about possible simplifications and ease
of understanding Ada by saying

   class type T1 is new T0;

instead of what we have now.---Meyer quotes from Ichbiah's resignation
letter which consistently outlines the complexity that Ada 9X
was to introduce. "With 9X, the number of interactions to
consider is close to 60,000 since we have 3 or more possibilities
in each case (that is, 3**10)."  No wonder that SPARK is a
restriction! ;-) ;-) ;-)



Tucker Taft, in lsn-1033-mrt, writes about

"the creation of multiple inheritance type (semi-)lattices using
the proposed Ada 9X object-oriented programming features."

"In this discussion, we will in general use Ada 9X terminology, where
every object has a single "type," and multiple similar types (typically
in some kind of hierarchy or oligarchy) form a "class" of types.  If we
want to use the term "class" as it is used in C++ or Eiffel, we will
always say "C++ class" or "Eiffel class."


I don't know when the 'Class attribute was added to the Ada 9X,
but it seems to me that here is one of its origins.

http://archive.adaic.com/standards/95lsn/