Re: Dynamicly declaring arrays (was: Time to join the fold?)

["news.oxy.com" <Vladimir_Olensky@oxy.com>]

robert_dewar@my-dejanews.com wrote in message
<797hjv$ivm$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>...
>In article <7973lb$mdl$1@remarQ.com>,
>  "news.oxy.com" <Vladimir_Olensky@oxy.com> wrote:
>> I could also mention that this was also used  in
>> Modula-2 as well (inner modules). Modula-2 had many
>> features that later was implemented in Ada.
>
>I don't believe that Modula-2 had much influence
>on the Ada design, but I may be wrong. Certainly
>the design of the modules facility for Algol-68
>(in which incidentally I participated, it was
>basically a three person effort, me, Charles
>Linsdsay, and Hendrick Boom) did have some
>influence.
>
>Is the time right for Modula-2 to have
>influenced the design (the time period was
>1975-1978). I thought M2 was later than this,
>but I may well be mistaken.
>


I think it does not matter much which was defined first and whether M2
influenced design of Ada 83 or not.
The people that were designing Ada 83 can only answer this question.

At the end of 70's there was some ideas in the air and they could be caught
and materialized into language specifications by different groups of people.
If we look at the history of science/technology we can find many examples
when isolated scientists and research groups in different countries were
catching and materializing the same ideas independently.
M2 was materialization of such ideas and they were embodied by Niklaus Wirth
in a way how he felt them.
As far as I remember it also was a part of his work on the "Lilith"
supercomputer project (probably I misspelled it) where M2 was used to write
OS for that machine.
Of course first M2 definition was published before Ada 83 definition as well
as first M2 implementations were available before first Ada implementations.
I have somewhere at home this M2 specification and can try to find it to
verify the date.
It may be so that experience with M2 was known to some members of Ada design
team and it could have some influence on them.
Anyway that is already part of the history.

What I found to be very interesting is that  GDB that comes with GNAT 3.11p
supports M2.
I found the following in the GDB manual (exact copy):
------------------------------------------------------------
|     Supported languages
|     ===================
|     GDB 4 supports Modula-2, Fortran, Ada, C, and C++.
|     ...
|     Modula-2
|      --------
|      The extensions made to GDB to support Modula-2 only support output
|  from the GNU Modula-2 compiler (which is currently being developed).
|  Other Modula-2 compilers are not currently supported, and attempting to
|  debug executables produced by them is most likely to give an error as
|  GDB reads in the executable's symbol table.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
It seems that it may happen that soon we will have an ALL IN distribution
package under GNU project.
History is about to finish one more circle.


Here I would like to add one more thing:
It is important to have some kind of internal feeling of the new ideas and
fresh vision of the old ones to feel the future and be able create something
that will have impact on the evolution as a whole. Such feeling is called
intuition and it is usually based on a large variety of experiences and
knowledges that are stored somewhere deeply in mind on sub-consciousness
level (after person mind filters out everything that is insignificant).

One of such old-new ideas is the implementation of the easily available
universal Ada RAD toolkit ("Ada Delphi").  If it has good materialization it
(as I feel it) can have great impact on the Ada future.
The more people feel like it the more chances for this to happen.


Regards,
Vladimir Olensky
(vladimir_olensky@yahoo.com)
(Vladimir_Olensky@oxy.com)
Telecommunication specialist,
Occidental C.I.S. Service, Inc. ( www.oxy.com )
Moscow,
Russia.