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

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

"Larry Kilgallen" <Kilgallen@SpamCop.net> wrote in message
news:qnlsMmlYZCr9@eisner.encompasserve.org...
>
> Don't worry about getting it into the ISO standards, just get people
> using a common set of packages and the rest will follow.  There were
> recent efforts here in this newsgroup in the area of containers; you
> are free to choose a different venue.
>
> There is _nothing_ about the ISO process that is holding you back,
> and libraries/packages have little to do with core language changes.

This is true. What matters with respect to libraries is not so much that
they have some rigid, formally defined, validated, ISO standard as it is
that at least most of the vendors provide pretty much the same thing. You
probably want a good deal of flexibility for libraries (at least in their
early lives) so they can be changed as experience dictates. Maybe at some
point when a given library has become very widespread and stable you could
get it declared part of the ISO standard - but you may never really want
that. Yopu may want to maintain the flexibility of being able to easily
change out the library for something else.

If we had some community concensus that one or more libraries was what we
wanted for doing job X, all you'd have to do is persuade the vendors to
distribute it with their compilers and it instantly becomes part of Ada even
if it isn't part of the "standard".

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com