From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,cb68a222818235ed X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public Path: g2news1.google.com!news1.google.com!news.glorb.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!local1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.comcast.com!news.comcast.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2004 23:34:48 -0500 Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2004 00:34:47 -0400 From: "Robert I. Eachus" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Renaming of enumeration constant References: <2irkl9Fqi7qpU1@uni-berlin.de> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.147.90.114 X-Trace: sv3-TJWv+1xbC8wCfu/81xJM5chVn8n8q8xFPIoQemKgUqO/N+zLDWY8RHMPBYp5GqmZYEhAa9w0mxYiuRA!kuHnOvMDKsU4FZJn45e2lxnor3OkGFRpfiqasHr3/n8FYngHckbP0SDf0CBaBQ== X-Complaints-To: abuse@comcast.net X-DMCA-Complaints-To: dmca@comcast.net X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.1 Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:1416 Date: 2004-06-12T00:34:47-04:00 List-Id: Jean-Pierre Rosen wrote: > Ada83 because Ichbiah insisted on it, due to his previous experience. I remember a comment by Robert Dewar about a DR meeting where the issue of removing derived types from Ada was discssed. Robert said: "...the vote was 8 to Ichbiah, so it will probably be reversed." Robert was right on the reversal, but I always remember that comment by Robert Dewar when anyone says that Ada was designed by a committee. There were a lot of committees that had input into and influence over the final form of Ada 83, but Jean Ichbiah always had the last say after he listened to all the input. I also remember when the first thing that Jean Ichbiah--or anyone--said to me at an early AdaTEC meeting in SanDiego was "Seven insults. Seven insults in one paragraph what were you thinking of?" I sort of looked blank and he said, "You were talking about the new rule forbidding nested accept statements." "Only seven? I thought there were more than that, but they had nothing to do with you." "Some were in the next paragraph." "Okay, I think the problem is that you were not at the first AdaTEC meeting in New York..." There was a problem in Ada 80, that the parameter declarations for accept statements were elaborated when the task was created. I showed a nasty example that "proved" that this needed to be fixed in the Reference Manual. But some people didn't understand that my nasty example was just that, and tried it against the ALS and AdaEd implementations. The result was what erroneous programs only threaten to do, unimaginable chaos. In the case of AdaEd, it crashed not only AdaEd, but the VAX it was running on, due to a known bug in VMS. So at the next DR meeting, nested accept statements must go. Of course, the bug in the reference manual was fixed also, so there was no need to outlaw nested accept statements. But that rule is still in the language. (Of course, the 'insults' were aimed at the people who didn't understand the example, and ignored the "-- disaster" comment in my example. I still think some of them were descriptive, not insults: "of all the stupid, idiotic, bird-brained things to do,...) Then again, I remember EE students presented with a "Handy-Dandy Fuse Tester" plugging it into a wall-socket and pressing the button. (The label of course said "If indicator light goes out when button is pressed, fuse was good.") Some things did get into Ada that Ichbiah didn't like, like the support for terminals that did not allow full ASCII. But if he felt strongly about something, he stood his ground. -- Robert I. Eachus The ideology he opposed throughout his political life insisted that history was moved by impersonal tides and unalterable fates. Ronald Reagan believed instead in the courage and triumph of free men and we believe it all the more because we saw that courage in him. -- George W. Bush June 11, 2004