Re: Announcing JGNAT public version 1.0p

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com>]

On Tue, 11 Apr 2000, Tucker Taft wrote:
> Brian Rogoff wrote:
> > ...
> > Seriously though, SML is a fine language to learn. Knowing proper ML style
> > will help you write clean Ada code in the same way that knowing Ada helps
> > you to write clean C code. If I'm not mistaken, the SML module system
> > even had some impact on the design of Ada 95, in particular generic
> > formal package parameters.
> 
> SML may be nice, but the designer of the Ada95 formal package parameter
> facility (;-) had very little knowledge of SML at the time of its design.
> I wonder where the idea that SML influenced Ada 95 came from...

Well, obviously, you know better than I do :-)

I got this idea from these papers. The bracketed comment is from one of
the authors, as I clipped the refs from a web page.

Shen J., Cormack G.V., and Duggan D., Local package instances are not
equivalent to generic formal package parameters, ACM Ada Letters 12:6
(1992), 47-49. 

Shen J. and Cormack G.V., On generic formal package parameters in Ada 9X,
ACM Ada Letters 12:3 (1992), 110-116. [Part of this work was adopted by
the Ada 9X committee for incorporation into the programming language Ada] 

These papers mention the SML module system as an influence on their
proposals and their propsals as influential on Ada 95. Sorry for spreading 
misinformation!

-- Brian