Re: Outside view (still): Development process in the Ada community

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

"Richard Riehle" <richard@adaworks.com> wrote in message
news:3CBE49C4.99CFA22D@adaworks.com...
>
> Dr. Dewar is correct in his view that the designers of Ada have taken
> great pains to avoid including language features that could be better
> implemented as library modules.   The question is whether these
> libraries should be part of the standard Annexes.   Should be expand
> the Annexes to include generalize GUI specifications,  Database
> specifications, etc?   The answer is not so simple.   When one realizes

O.K., but here's a fair question: If the language is designed to be extended
with libraries, why do we seem to have such difficulty in incorporating
libraries in some kind of "standard" way? There's extension of the language
by my personal definition of libraries in my own development environment and
that's fine. I realize there are all sorts of sticky issues in terms of
actually updating the ARM annexes with additional libraries that would
probably be useful to everyone, so I can see the reluctance to do so. But
shouldn't we have some means of less formally extending the language via
libraries that might be viewed more as "convention" than "standard"?
Something formal enough that everybody understands what the libraries are
about and they become "The Answer" for the problem domain in question (as
opposed to "An Answer") but not so formal as to make it difficult to get
things into or out of it?

I think the W3C has a kind of interesting approach. They sort of look over a
problem and put up a web page that says "Here's a standard that addresses
the problem. Do you like it?" They might even put out two or three competing
or overlapping standards to see which ones seem to begin to fly. The
standards keep going through revisions as comments come in and sooner or
later they declare victory and say "O.K. This standard is considered stable,
so we promise no more changes to it." If better ideas and enhancements come
along, they start a "Level 2" for the standard.

Wouldn't something similar work for adding libraries to Ada? Some sort of
consortium of vendors and users to develop library specs & possibly bodies
that go through iterations until everyone is happy or at least too tired to
keep arguing about it? Then declare some version of "By Convention, Ada
Compilers Will Include This..." as a non-binding "standard" for adoption by
members.

Just an idea....

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