Re: Augusta: An open source Ada 2012 compiler (someday?)

[Stefan.Lucks@uni-weimar.de]

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On Mon, 24 Mar 2014, Randy Brukardt wrote:

> "J Kimball" <spam@example.com> wrote in message
> news:lgopof$unl$1@loke.gir.dk...

>> Ada has become the American tax code. It's becoming abundantly clear 
>> that there has to be a massive break in backward compatibility in the 
>> next revision of the language that makes writing compilers easier, not 
>> just keeping AdaCore in business, but breaking out of the framework of 
>> Ada 95.
>
> I'd be in favor of that, but I'm dubious that the customers that support 
> Ada would want to make that sort of change. And if the customers don't 
> come along, then there is little energy for anything to happen. After 
> all, most hobbyest driven projects tend to wane after a couple of years, 
> and that's not going to work for the sorts of long-lived projects that 
> Ada is best at.

What about moving not-so-often used language features into an annex?

Thus, if your customers demand the feature, you are allowed to support it. 
Furthermore, anyone supporting that feature would do so so in a completely 
compatible way.

But if you don't want to support that feature, or you can't for some 
reason, you are allowed to support Ada 20XY without that annex.

As an example, I would consider interfaces. The support for multiple 
inheritance from "interface" could could be moved into an annex, and thus 
become optional for the language implementer. The key-word "interface" 
should remain reserved, for compatibility reasons.


------  I  love  the  taste  of  Cryptanalysis  in  the morning!  ------
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