the Ada mandate, and why it collapsed and died (was): 64 bit addressing and OOP

[xanthian@well.com (Kent Paul Dolan)]

Richard Riehle <richard@adaworks.com> wrote:

> The Ada mandate was poorly managed by the DoD.

Talk about praising with faint damnation.  They couldn't
have done worse by avowedly working against adoption of Ada.

Creating an unenforced underfunded mandate only accomplished
sowing confusion and a burning desire to find a way around
the rules, which all services but the USMC then took up as
the latest "fun frustrating feeble feckless DoD management
by paid professional footdragging" game.  Which DoD lost to
its component parts.

> The language is structured around a few simple principles.

Which seem to be "simple" only in the minds of computer
language theorists, not in the minds of us mere programmers,
to whom the reasons for which these principles are
meritorious and why they should govern our lives are still
quite convincingly opaque.

> Some of those principles are more rigorously defined in
> Ada than in other languages.

If only the same rigor had been applied to furnishing
_readable explanations_ of these principles, in
self-contained, self-standing "why, not merely what" style,
in words clear enough to have been penned by Hemmingway, the
pain and suffering of programmers new to Ada might be much
diminished.

> One principle, separation of scope from visibility, is so
> different that even Ada programmers have difficulty with
> it at first.

Last time I checked by comp.lang.ada [which the mannerless
arrogance of certain posters there toward newbies finally
made unstomachable], this issue still seemed to consume the
bulk of the newsgroup.  Are the questions now settled, and
is there somewhere available an online tutorial explaining
the issues clearly enough for a sixth grader to read and
use?

> Once they stop fighting it and understand it, the rest of
> the language falls into place.

Much like certain editors better not brought up again, or
lots of other software cobbling tools, for that matter.

xanthian.