Re: How many different processors do you use?

[Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>]

In article <19990626.7A2D4E8.143E4@mojaveg.ridgecrest.ca.us>,
  mojaveg@ridgecrest.ca.us (Everett M. Greene) wrote:
> In the case of Ada, DoD made a
> flat statement that their definition was the standard.
> Consensus existed by decree.

Complete nonsense. Obviously you were not involved in the
process, and are making uninformed guesses that do not
have even a vague relationship with reality!

In fact both Ada 83 and Ada 95 were very much consensus
operations, although some would say that Jean Ichbiah
and Tucker Taft had the ultimate say in many critical
areas. Certainly the DoD did not dictate the definition,
and could not have done so (even if it had wanted to,
which it most emphatically did NOT want to). And as for
the idea that the ISO WG9 committee is somehow subject
to DoD decrees that's good for a real laugh.

One thing that the DoD *did* emphatically want was that Ada
would become both a national and international standard. They
realized up front (unlike Sun) that this meant that the final
shape of the language would have to be determined by national
and international consensus and they welcomed this process.

I am always amazed by the amount of nonsense attempts there
are to rewrite history by people who were not around and
simply don't know what happened!

None of this is secret, it was a very open process, much has
been written about it, and many of the participants in
comp.lang.ada at least *were* around and know perfectly well
what really happened :-)

Robert Dewar


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