Re: How far with Ada??

[mfb@mbunix.mitre.org (Michael F Brenner)]

Shaun Owen from adfa.oz.au asks How far with Ada??
    > Hi, I'm studying Elec Eng and we have been using Ada95 (on a unix server)
    > extensively for learning programming and computer science.
    > A subject I'm doing now is called Data Structures and it is all done in
    > Ada.... what does the future hold for Ada? ....
    > Appreciate incitive comments from anyone...

Well, after checkin my British dictionary to see if insightful is spelled
inciteful, and seeing that inciteful is the same in British and American,
here is an inciteful comment. Ten years from now Ada will still be better
at tasking, catching bugs at compile time, reducing life-cycle maintenance
costs, parameterizing objects by types, and integrating systems written in
multiple languages together than any other language, although its syntax
will have been modified to permit packages to be second class objects
(passable to other non-generic packages), and text_io will have been 
replaced with ASSOCIATIVE_URL_IO which reliably queries and updates any 
format of information anywhere using fast associative bulk memory. The
first Ada 2000X application will be a microphone into which you hum a
tune and it write out the score and identifies the tune. Twenty 
years from now with the invention of the 4 giga-neuron fully optical 
memory a new language will emerge to replace Ada. It will be called 
Ada 1X, with full mental control of cursors, voice dictation input, 
mental hyperlink selection, incremental or continuous consciousness
uploading onto the Net which will be renamed the Skein, and consciousness
downloading into robots. Yes, the forty years the human race spent
languishing in the mires of mouse clicking will finally be over, and
we will being progressing from the point where that hideous invention
took us off the track of our evolutionary objective.
Thirty years from now, the bandwidth resolution of video screens 
will be solved; we will finally be able to display two full-resolution
pieces of paper next to each other on the screen, which will be displayed
using living crystallographic projection which gains in resolution if
you speak lovingly to it, and Ada 2X will be the only language capable of
errorlesslly transmitting thought processes to these high-resolution
pages, implementing for the first time, effortless program-what-I-wish
not what-I-code forever changing computing science into the Art of computing.