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From: eachus@spectre.mitre.org (Robert I. Eachus)
Subject: Re: OO, C++, and something much better!
Date: 1997/01/10
Message-ID: <EACHUS.97Jan10161738@spectre.mitre.org>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 209010196
references: <JSA.97Jan1181506@alexandria>
 <rmartin-0201971129150001@pool11-018.wwa.com>
organization: The Mitre Corp., Bedford, MA.
newsgroups: 
 comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.smalltalk,comp.lang.eiffel,comp.lang.ada,comp.object,comp.software-eng
Date: 1997-01-10T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


In article <32D51BC8.41C67EA6@escmail.orl.lmco.com> Ted Dennison <dennison@escmail.orl.lmco.com> writes:

  > Does that mean that they ALSO started thinking about the revision
  > again in 1993, even though the Ada 95 effort was well underway?
  > ;-)

    I wouldn't have responded, but it is a funny story.

    First, there was a decision by the Ada Board in 1988 to recommend
revision of the Ada standard, and for the next revision to be the last
to use the government funded contractor approach.  I hope an
electronic copy of that report is around somewhere, but if not I may
still have it on a (Macintosh) disk.

    However, the ISO standard was not approved until 1987 due to
procedural and other problems--even though the ISO standard was a one
page document pointing to the ANSI and French standards.  (Alsys did
the French translation with a lot of involvement from Jean and Mike,
so it was very faithful to the original.)

    So at Zandvoort, after a long discussion at the WG9 meeting of
slipping the schedule for Ada 9X six months, with detailed debate on
dates for committee drafts, ISO standards processes, etc. Bob Mathis
announced during the "new business" part of the meeting that ISO had
asked him as WG9 convener if we were planning to revise the Ada 87
standard.

    And finally, the real requirement is to revisit every standard at
least every five years to take action on it: keep it, revise it or
abandon it.  After 10 years most standards organizations automatically
abandon a standard if no action has been taken.  There was a lot of
discussion about whether to take explicit action on the ANSI Ada 83,
or to let it disappear. (For most purposes it was technically already
superceded by the identical ISO standard, which wouldn't expire until
1997.)  This was resolved by the Memorandum of Agreement between the
DoD, ANSI and ISO.  All three basically agreed to approve Ada 9X
together, and that Ada 83/87 would be in force until then.

    Since Ada 95 was actually approved in January 1995, we have until
December 2005 to amend it or whatever.  At this point I hope we can
have a nice little fold in the fixes to minor gotchas revision, and
leave any major revision for Ada 10X.  (If you want to think of it as
a fix the annexes revision, fine.  Most of the problems the ARG has
discussed so far are either chapter 13 issues or related to one or
another annexes.  The core language apparently got lots of attention
during the revision process, but the annexes were trying to track a
moving target.)



--

					Robert I. Eachus

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