Inheritance and Ada

[sdl@MITRE-BEDFORD.ARPA (Litvintchouk)]

> This is to thank Steve for his wonderfully clear explanation of Ada's
> limitations as an object-oriented language, and to flame at bit at those
> who are willing to live with those limitations rather than fixing them.
> 
> C also doesn't support object-oriented encapsulation and inheritance, but
> we've fixed that with a tool that does, Objective-C.
> 
> I recently received a paper about a similar tool for Ada, InnovAda, to
> be presented at the Technology Strategies conference. Call me or send
> mail and I'll put you in touch with the author.
> -- 
> 	Brad J. Cox; VP and Chief Technical Officer
> 	Productivity Products International
> 	75 Glen Road; Sandy Hook, CT 06482
> 	(203) 426 1875; ...yale!bunker!ppi!cox

1.  Brad, I am interested in hearing more about your Ada tool.  Please
put me in touch with the right people.  (Actually, I would have
guessed that an "Objective-Ada" would have been *much* harder than an
"Objective-C," due to Ada's lack of access types to subprograms, its
strong typing and encapsulation models, etc.)

2.  However, from the little you've said about it, it still doesn't
sound like a solution, but a way to live with Ada's lack of explicit
support for such object-oriented programming (OOP) techniques as
inheritance and delegation.  I hope you'll agree with me that a cure
is still preferable to a crutch.

I believe it is both reasonable and desirable to explore ways to add
explicit support for OOP to the Ada language, say by 1993.  (The
language does come up for review every five years, and this time there
is a technically enlightened, and growing, Ada user community that is
aware of recent advances in computer science.)  I see no reason why
this would "break" the Ada language; ref. such languages/projects as
Owl, Eiffel and Actra for potential solutions.  Perhaps somebody at
the Software Engineering Institute should be looking into this (hint,
hint; any of you SEI guys/gals got your ears on?).


Steven Litvintchouk
MITRE Corporation
Burlington Road
Bedford, MA  01730
(617)271-7753

ARPA:  sdl@mitre-bedford.arpa
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