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Date: 19 Jul 93 16:49:11 GMT
From: eachus@mitre-bedford.arpa  (Robert I. Eachus)
Subject: Re: How does your language grow? (Follow-up on comments on ADM Tuttle 
comments)
Message-ID: <EACHUS.93Jul19114911@spectre.mitre.org>
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

In article <1993Jul16.173441.22720@seas.gwu.edu> mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael
 Feldman) writes:

  > That's a long time. Anyone wishing to develop extended Ada's (indeed
  > contracted ones, too, but that's not where the action is), was free not
  > only to do so but also to call it Ada. 

     I usually don't disagree with Mike, but this is more of a reminder
of things he may not have thought of...

     First of all, the original policy was, no subsets, no
UNAUTHORIZED supersets, but the expected authorized supersets for
things like database, graphics, etc. never materialized.  This was
mostly due to a strong preference in the Ada community for "legal Ada"
package interfaces instead of preprocessors.  Much more surprising has
been the almost total lack of implementation defined pragmas and
attributes outside of VAX Ada.

  > Even if such a system could not legally be validated, it could
  > certainly have been used for any project that wasn't production
  > DoD work. Let's debunk this myth once and for all. I think we can
  > forgive DoD for insisting that compilers used for its serious
  > projects be validated and therefore not support dialects - after
  > all, that's what eliminating the language Babel is all about. But
  > that never stood in the way of the rest of us.

    And doesn't stand in the way of the DoD using, say, DRAGOON on a
project for which it makes sense.  It just requires a waiver (or an
exception on Air Force projects if you use a preprocessor which
generates Ada).

  > I've promised not to contribute to flame wars, so I'll not engage
  > in speculation about why this experimentation didn't really
  > happen. But facts are facts - I NEVER heard anyone discourage
  > experimentation, except when it came to serious compilers for
  > serious DoD projects.  University or other lab projects could darn
  > well have done the kind of stuff you mention. I'll leave it to the
  > flamers to fight endlessly about _why_ they didn't do it, but this
  > does _not_ mean they _couldn't_.  I've hung around this business
  > for ten years; I think I have my facts straight.

    There has been a significant amount of experimentation, a lot of
it funded by the DoD!  Successful experiments have, for the most part,
fallen in three categories:

    1)  Object-oriented programming extensions.
    2)  Distribution of Ada environments.
    3)  Annotations for design purposes.

    In addition there are the user/implementor teams for Ada 9X.  Note
that the first two areas made it into Ada 9X, and the concensus in the
design language area has been that the annotations should be
structured comments.

--

					Robert I. Eachus

with Standard_Disclaimer;
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