Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@shellx.best.com>]

On 31 Jul 1997, Robert Dewar wrote:
> Algol-68 was never successful, it was never standardized, it was never
> widely used. The nearest that it came to serious use was Algol-68R at
> RRE, but despite Ian's best efforts, A68 waws never really a contender,
> and there were very few compilers completed. It was a sad case of a
> language that was more or less DOA. (I was chair of the A68 mainteance
> committee for a number of years, so I know this history well).

That is sad, it seemed like a nice language on paper. I think that user
definable binary operators are a very good thing, and something I haven't 
seen in too many other languages. The lack of generics and packages would 
be too much though.

> SNOBOL (more specifically SPITBOL, which as you probably know I created),
> is amazingly alive. I can tell you all sorts of interesting projects that
> are using it. One of the most interesting is a project for creating
> dictionaries of native American dialects -- a race against time, since
> some of these dialects, unlike SNOBOL, are definitely dieing.

How close is SPITBOL to Icon? I know a little of the latter, none of the 
former, although I take it they are related. Icon is definitely alive. 

If you'd like to answer this question by releasing the version of GNAT
with the embedded SPITBOL, be my guest ;-).

-- Brian