Re: Ada Core Technologies and Ada95 Standards

["Marin David Condic, 407.796.8997, M/S 731-93" <condicma@PWFL.COM>]

Ken Garlington <garlingtonke@LMTAS.LMCO.COM> writes:
>
>OK. Then you would agree that ACVC testing should be reduced or eliminated,
>in favor of something else. I can accept this. What (if anything) would
>you recommend be done in lieu of DoD "meddling" to improve compiler quality,
>or would reducing/killing ACVC by itself improve compiler quality?
>
>
    Actually, what may have been a better idea as far as a validation
    suite for Ada goes, would have been to concentrate on the
    availability of features in *some* form.

    For example, rather than test an implementation to find out if
    they correctly handle every possible combination of generic formal
    parameter and issue appropriate error messages, why not
    concentrate on determining that an implementation handles generics
    *at all*? Check to see that it can handle some relatively
    straightforward set of cases and declare "Yup. These dudes have
    Generic Packages. They didn't leave that feature out. It may be
    buggy as hell, but it isn't a 'partial' language implementation."

    Look at some of the early "subset" Ada83 compilers and you can see
    where developers were having problems. They came out with
    compilers that didn't support tasking, generics, chapter 13 and,
    by consequence, much of the I/O. It would have been more useful
    from a "validation" standpoint to know that a given implementation
    would let you write programs using some/all of the major language
    features in some syntactically correct way. You could write your
    programs with some assurance that as the compilers got better, so
    would your code, but that you'd have usable features at some
    minimal level.

    Maybe we all more or less agree that the original validation goal
    was a little too aggressive. At what level it should have backed
    off is not at all easy to see.

    Pax,
    Marin

Marin David Condic, Senior Computer Engineer    ATT:        407.796.8997
M/S 731-93                                      Technet:    796.8997
Pratt & Whitney, GESP                           Fax:        407.796.4669
P.O. Box 109600                                 Internet:   CONDICMA@PWFL.COM
West Palm Beach, FL 33410-9600                  Internet:   MDCONDIC@AOL.COM
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