New Ada Standard

New Ada Standard

[Jeffrey D. Cherry]

I see that ISO and ANSI have a new listing for Ada, specifically:

ISO/IEC 8652/Amd1:2007
Information technology - Programming languages - Ada - Amendment 1

I haven't purchased this document, yet.  I just wanted to confirm that this 
is the new Ada05 standard that we've been waiting for.  If it is, then should 
I be calling this the Ada07 standard?  Also, will there be a reduced price 
version in the near future?  (It is currently listed as US $238 from ANSI for 
a 1.44MB PDF file.)

Re: New Ada Standard

[Jeffrey R. Carter]

Jeffrey D. Cherry wrote:
> 
> I haven't purchased this document, yet.  I just wanted to confirm that this 
> is the new Ada05 standard that we've been waiting for.  If it is, then should 
> I be calling this the Ada07 standard?  Also, will there be a reduced price 
> version in the near future?  (It is currently listed as US $238 from ANSI for 
> a 1.44MB PDF file.)

Some people are calling this Ada 2005. Some are calling it Ada 2007. 
Some are calling it Ada 07. Mostly, though, I think we'll just call it Ada.

I believe you can find the same text at

http://www.adaic.org/standards/ada05.html

for somewhat less than $238.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"Monsieur Arthur King, who has the brain of a duck, you know."
Monty Python & the Holy Grail
09

Re: New Ada Standard

[Randy Brukardt]

"Jeffrey R. Carter" <jrcarter@acm.org> wrote in message
news:C_9Qh.26450$oV.6870@attbi_s21...
> Jeffrey D. Cherry wrote:
> >
> > I haven't purchased this document, yet.  I just wanted to confirm that
this
> > is the new Ada05 standard that we've been waiting for.  If it is, then
should
> > I be calling this the Ada07 standard?  Also, will there be a reduced
price
> > version in the near future?  (It is currently listed as US $238 from
ANSI for
> > a 1.44MB PDF file.)
>
> Some people are calling this Ada 2005. Some are calling it Ada 2007.
> Some are calling it Ada 07. Mostly, though, I think we'll just call it
Ada.
>
> I believe you can find the same text at
>
> http://www.adaic.org/standards/ada05.html
>
> for somewhat less than $238.

It should be noted that the ISO version is the Amendment itself, which is a
list of changes to the Ada 95 standard. It's not very easy to use. It makes
much more sense to use one of the consolidated versions; you can get those
from the above site; and you can get printed versions from Springer; see
http://www.adaic.org/standards/articles/lrm.html.

                             Randy Brukardt

Re: New Ada Standard

[Stephen Leake]

"Jeffrey D. Cherry" <ffej.yrrehc@stepbfav.moc> writes:

> ... If it is, then should I be calling this the Ada07 standard?

The ISO working group on Ada agreed that the common vernacular for the
2007 version should be Ada 2005. See the post in this newsgroup
recently (I searched for Ada05 in comp.lang.ada at
http://groups.google.com/advanced_group_search?hl=en):

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ada/browse_thread/thread/11c630572e59f461/f1cf1036a71fca56?lnk=st&q=&rnum=3&hl=en#f1cf1036a71fca56

The rationale for this choice is that a lot of people have been
calling it Ada 2005 for a while, and there's no real harm in
continuing. The GNAT compiler has an option -ada05, for example, which
is not going to change to -ada07.

-- 
-- Stephe

Re: New Ada Standard

[Randy Brukardt]

"Stephen Leake" <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org> wrote in message
news:uzm5pahon.fsf@stephe-leake.org...
> "Jeffrey D. Cherry" <ffej.yrrehc@stepbfav.moc> writes:
>
> > ... If it is, then should I be calling this the Ada07 standard?
>
> The ISO working group on Ada agreed that the common vernacular for the
> 2007 version should be Ada 2005. See the post in this newsgroup
> recently (I searched for Ada05 in comp.lang.ada at
> http://groups.google.com/advanced_group_search?hl=en):

This is not an accurate summary of the WG 9 action. The WG 9 vote was
intended to apply to the name during the development period (that is, up to
standardization). After that, of course, the name of the language is Ada.

> The rationale for this choice is that a lot of people have been
> calling it Ada 2005 for a while, and there's no real harm in
> continuing. The GNAT compiler has an option -ada05, for example, which
> is not going to change to -ada07.

The only rationale was that we were hopelessly deadlocked on the issue. But
there had to be some resolution (in that *something* had to go into the
documents), and the people who were against using "Ada 2005" did not feel as
strongly as some of those who wanted to stick with it. And in any case, the
decision made there is not binding on anyone for purposes other than
official WG 9 purposes (and even there, it should be avoided in favor of
more precise identification of standards).

There are a lot of good arguments for changing the name now as was done with
Ada 95 (especially that older articles which reference obsolete drafts of
the language would not confuse readers with misinformation); there are also
good arguments for staying the course (it doesn't make sense to dilute Ada's
marketing).

In any case, the best choice is to call it "Ada"; it's now the standard and
should be the default on new compilers (it certainly will be on Janus/Ada).
If you need to reference the standard itself, that is "Amendment 1" (there
is no standard document that includes the complete language; you have to
merge three of them to get that, or use Ada Europe's consolidated standard -
which isn't official anyway). You might need year numbers to talk about
obsolete Ada versions like Ada 95, but not about the current one.

                                  Randy.

Re: New Ada Standard

[brian.b.mcguinness]

On Apr 3, 7:37 pm, "Randy Brukardt" <r...@rrsoftware.com> wrote:

> In any case, the best choice is to call it "Ada"; it's now the standard and
> should be the default on new compilers (it certainly will be on Janus/Ada).
> If you need to reference the standard itself, that is "Amendment 1" (there
> is no standard document that includes the complete language; you have to
> merge three of them to get that, or use Ada Europe's consolidated standard -
> which isn't official anyway). You might need year numbers to talk about
> obsolete Ada versions like Ada 95, but not about the current one.
>
>                                   Randy.

To me, the term "Ada" could refer to any version of the language.  It
is
sometimes necessary to make it clear that you are referring to the
most
recent version of the language, and a term such as "Ada 2005" is a
convenient way of doing so.

For example, if someone wanted to inquire whether a certain compiler
supported all of the latest language features, he might ask whether
that compiler supported the full Ada 2005 standard.

--- Brian

Re: New Ada Standard

[Randy Brukardt]

<brian.b.mcguinness@lmco.com> wrote in message
news:1175687797.356962.209890@o5g2000hsb.googlegroups.com...
> On Apr 3, 7:37 pm, "Randy Brukardt" <r...@rrsoftware.com> wrote:
>
> > In any case, the best choice is to call it "Ada"; it's now the standard
and
> > should be the default on new compilers (it certainly will be on
Janus/Ada).
> > If you need to reference the standard itself, that is "Amendment 1"
(there
> > is no standard document that includes the complete language; you have to
> > merge three of them to get that, or use Ada Europe's consolidated
standard -
> > which isn't official anyway). You might need year numbers to talk about
> > obsolete Ada versions like Ada 95, but not about the current one.
> >
>
> To me, the term "Ada" could refer to any version of the language.  It is
> sometimes necessary to make it clear that you are referring to the most
> recent version of the language, and a term such as "Ada 2005" is a
> convenient way of doing so.

True enough, but you can only use that informally...

> For example, if someone wanted to inquire whether a certain compiler
> supported all of the latest language features, he might ask whether
> that compiler supported the full Ada 2005 standard.

...and by using the word "standard", you've left the realm of informal.
Indeed, there is no such thing as "the full Ada 2005 standard", and there
never will be (even ignoring the year number issue).

The current Ada standard is made up of three ISO/IEC published documents:
The International Standard "Programming Languages - Ada" (ISO/IEC
8652:1995); Technical Corrigendum 1 (ISO/IEC 8652:1995/COR.1:2001); and
Amendment 1 (ISO/IEC 8652:1995/AMD.1:2007). Note that only the first is even
called "International Standard". The others aren't "Standards" (even though
they're standardized, and go through similar approval processes as a
standard). There is no single document that you can reference, two of them
aren't Standards (although its probably OK to reference Amendment 1 as a
"standard", note the capitalization difference), and none of them are
published in 2005.

So it's OK to reference "full Ada 2005" as an informal reference to a
language; reference the Ada Europe consolidated reference manual (its cover
says "Ada 2005 Reference Manual"); [but that is most definitely not a
standard!], or reference the specific documents by their publication dates
("the Ada standards as of 2007" or "the 2007 Amendment to Ada"), but it
isn't OK to reference "standard" (singular) for Ada anymore, nor is it OK to
reference the standards documents by years other than those they are
published in. The possibility of confusion between "standard" and "Standard"
is so severe that think it is best to avoid the word altogether.

Admittedly, Ada users have a long history of being confused about what is a
standard and what is not (the RM you have on your desk or in your computer
is almost certainly not a standard, no matter which version of Ada you are
using, it just contains text fairly similar to that in the Standard [and
other documents]).

If it was up to me, I call it Ada 2007, as that doesn't lead to a confusion
between the standards and the other documents. But even that isn't ideal for
a number of reasons. But we're now in a situation that any name that you use
will be either misleading or wrong in some contexts or will be loudly
criticized by various self-appointed critics. I don't want to go there, so I
don't put any year number behind Ada unless I'm specifically talking about
old, obsolete versions.

In any case, "Ada" officially means the most recent set of standards; older
standards are "canceled and replaced". Using "Ada" when you mean only "Ada
83" is just plain wrong and is far too common (especially amongst those who
only used Ada in the 1980's). I understand the ambiguity problem, but I
prefer an combination of education (to get writers out of their bad habits)
and direct references to the actual Amendment document when absolutely
necessary.

                                          Randy.