Re: Rant! (was) Development process in the Ada community

[Ingo Marks <adv@region-nord.de>]

Michael Erdmann wrote:

> Kent Paul Dolan wrote:
>>
>> No, I sign my name "LCDR, Retired" when I care to bother; I don't have
>> any particular bone to pick with the military.  DoD has abandoned Ada,
>> that is the problem.  The head has been cut off, the body continues to
>> twitch.  Ada needs a new mandate, some sense of direction so it doesn't
>> just continue to march in place, and I don't see it happening.
> 
> This is exaclty the impression i have my self. So i was wondering
> if Ada could take a new direction, when the open source communitiy is
> more directly involved by establishing a public process in order
> to enhance the predefined libraries, and may be later, to make an
> attempt to get these things into ISO etc..

Who "owns" Ada? The DoD has decided to quit Ada so they don't seem to have 
any more interest. 

A new standardization project needs a central place to start. CAD is a good 
starting point to discuss but the many messages are scattered all over the 
group and it becomes difficult for me to collect the essence of all ideas. 
You complained that the focus of this thread is already out of control.

I would like to suggest to create a new website where you list all your 
intentions and considerations. People will read them and make comments 
there and/or here. People will make source code contributions and the whole 
thing will grow step by step.

Do you want open source library standards for the current Ada 95 standard 
or do you want to have the language "polished up", too? 

Ada is impressive but my first impressions were that some (few) things are 
unnecessarily complicated which have a deterring effect to newbies. For 
example string handling. The distinction between fixed and unbounded 
strings confused me at first (and my compiler produced at lot of error 
messages ;-) Somewhere I read that the Ada 95 standard would support string 
handling with garbage collections already (but no compiler has implemented 
this yet). It would be fine if this could be done in an open source 
standardization project.

Ingo