Ada language revision

[SALLEN%LOCK.SPAN@STAR.STANFORD.EDU (Stanley Roger Allen, AdaDude)]

	Well, time is pressing on and the review has begun for
analyzing anew changes that should be made to the Ada language.
Through a variety of sources, a number of not-very-bright statements
have come to our attention concerning "improvements" to the Ada
language that should be "easily incorporated" into the the 1994
revision.

	A lot of these people are certainly driven by nothing more
sinister than the "feature junkie" complex (cf. Dijkstra's Turing
Award lecture, 1972).  What makes a lot of these suggestions dangerous
is more that just a lack of appreciation for the language design and
structure.  We are also seeing a deep misapprehension of what the
goals of the Ada program are to begin with.  We are not trying to
create a research engine, or a summation of the latest programming
language paradigms, or a fault-tolerant distributed operating system, 
etc.  Those who are to make decisions about the future of the Ada 
language need discover what exactly we *are* trying to create.

	To give a one-line answer to this question would be to defeat
the purpose of this missive.  I am proposing that anyone who wishes to
make suggestions for improving the language, adding new features,
deleting language elements, or change the organization of the language
(even in ways that may seem trivial) should first do their homework.
There is a specific body of knowledge that you should possess when
approaching this topic.  Have you read the Steelman document and/or
its predecessors?  (Do you even know what the Steelman document is?) 
Have you read the "Rationale for the Design of the Ada Language"?  Do
you understand the type system of the Ada language?  Have you been
looking through the megabytes of textual commentaries that have been
accumulating since the beginning of the Ada program?  Does the LRM
still confuse you? 

	Perhaps there should be a "required reading list" and
"qualifying exams" for Ada language maintainers.  Perhaps there is; I
don't know.  Jean Ichbiah says that many languages previous to Ada
followed a three-step process for their creation: "shoot, aim, think".
Ada is among the languages that reversed the process, which is one of
the reasons for the great success it has become.  In maintaining the 
language, thinking should also come first.  Part of that thinking is 
going back to previous thinking and absorbing it.  Any other path is 
pure hubris.

					Stanley Allen
					allen@star.stanford.edu