Re: Ada's (in)visibility in the engineering community

[schonber@acf3.nyu.edu (Ed Schonberg)]

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From: schonberg@cs.nyu.edu (Edmond Schonberg)
Date: 28 Sep 92 16:52 EDT
Subject: Ada's (in)visibility in the engineering community

Val Kartchner (cal@news.ccutah.edu) say:
>  My opinion: "Although the Ada community would never state it so baldly, it
>     appears clear to us that Ada 9X, is to some extent, a reaction to C++
>     By extending Ada with SOME of the best ideas of C++, Ada did, in some
>     measure, catch up to C++."

I fully agree, language designers certainly learn from each other,
and it is perfectly clear to everyone associated with the Ada9X project
that C++ is the most direct contender in use today. Of course, the final
sentence should not be in the past tense: Ada9X is not a completed
design yet. Furthermore, the borrowings from Ada into C++ are (at this
point) more apparent that the borrowings from C++ to Ada9X. Some
aspects of Ada9X are indeed a reaction to C++, but most of Ada9X
consists of extensions and generalizations of Ada facilities, and remain
very much within the spirit of the original language. 

> Well, it would seem that Mr. Schonberg was incorrect, since Bjarne
> Stroustrup has stated publicly numerous times that Ada was the
> inspiration for some of the features that he put in C++.  
 
> The C++ Programming Language: Second Edition," (Introduces templates and
> exception handling to the C++ language) p. 4:

>    The template facility was partly designed to formalize macro usage, partly
>    inspired by the Ada generics 

My apologies for having missed this reference; the first edition of the
book had no mention of Ada, and in  the public presentations I have
attended Ada was NEVER mentioned. It stands to reason that Ada would
have to be mentioned in connection with generics and exceptions. Even
though some prefiguration of these features appeared in older languages,
it is fair to say that Ada was the first reasonably widespread language
to develop these features fully. When I mentioned "the C++ community" I
did not mean Bjarne Stroustrup, whose erudition does not need my praise,
but the great majority of C++ programmers, who might have an instinctive
reaction against Ada, even when some features of their favorite language
owes something to it. We might as well aknowledge the extent to which
we influence each other. How else will we learn to write better
software?

Ed Schonberg

New York University
schonberg@cs.nyu.edu