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From: eachus@spectre.mitre.org (Robert I. Eachus)
Newsgroups: 
 comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.programming,comp.lang.c++,comp.object
Subject: Re: COBOL origin (was Re: Why don't large companies use Ada?)
Date: 12 Dec 94 11:45:52
Organization: The Mitre Corp., Bedford, MA.
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In-reply-to: mshapiro@nosc.mil's message of Wed, 30 Nov 1994 22:13:51 GMT
Xref: bga.com comp.lang.ada:8541 comp.lang.c:34338 comp.programming:5786
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Date: 1994-12-12T11:45:52+00:00
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In article <1994Nov30.221351.2917@nosc.mil> mshapiro@nosc.mil (Michael D Shapiro) writes:

  > COBOL did evolve, of course.  The 1960 standard served as a
  > starting point and many companies built language processors based
  > on it, with their own extensions.  By the time of the 1974
  > standard, people were really starting to think of actually
  > standardizing and the Federal Information Processing Standard
  > (FIPS) specifying four levels of the language helped get rid of
  > many idiosyncrasies.  Companies continued to "improve" it, adding
  > newer programming constructs.  Another standard appeared in 1985.

   Don't ignore COBOL 68, and wasn't there a COBOL 64?  In the early
years COBOL evolved fairly rapidly.

  > One problem many people have with Ada is that it was not allowed to
  > evolve in the same way most other languages did.  This lack of
  > incremental improvements has meant that new paradigms cannot be handled
  > easily, requiring instead a massive step that still won't turn out
  > right in the view of many.  This view of a language, frozen in time,
  > may be wonderful for the managers of huge programs, but it turns many
  > programmers off.

   Ada went from Green, to Preliminary Ada, to Ada 80, to Ada 83 in
about 5 years, so the step from Ada 83 to Ada 95 should be regarded as
appropriate for a mature language.  Those first revisions were fairly
large steps (mostly visibly in exceptions and text IO), and Ada 80 was
a military standard...

--

					Robert I. Eachus

with Standard_Disclaimer;
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function Message (Text: in Clever_Ideas) return Better_Ideas is...