Re: status of Ada STL?

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

Yes, I understand that. I just think that so long as the reigning notion is
that it has to be part of the ARM in order to be part of Ada, it will always
take ten years to get something new and useful into the language.

OTOH, if there was some body of vendors, academics, SIGAda people, major
users and gadflies that were willing to declare "This reference
implementation of linked lists is what will come with all compilers as of
next week..." then we'd have a linked list library. Would it be 100%
portable? Would it be 100% flawless? Would it be 100% well specified in its
behavior? No, no and no. But it would *exist* and I think thats a big deal.

If it was done by "Reference Implementation" and made available on easy
terms for distribution by the vendors, it doesn't particularly even
hamstring anyone long term by tying them to some "bad idea". You issue a new
reference implementation to fix bad ideas and anyone with legacy code just
keeps using the legacy library. So long as its all in source and under easy
terms (public domain?) nobody gets hurt. What you get as an improvement over
the existing situation (roll-your-own or download your favorite flavor) is
some consistency across compilers and the ability to say "This is the
standard way you make a dynamic array in Ada...." or "This is how you
multiply two matrices in one line of Ada code..." when it comes up on
newsgroups. :-)

MDC
--
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Marin David Condic
I work for: http://www.belcan.com/
My project is: http://www.jast.mil/

Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ a c m . o r g

    "I'd trade it all for just a little more"
        --  Charles Montgomery Burns, [4F10]
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Randy Brukardt <randy@rrsoftware.com> wrote in message
news:uoka2alhr78538@corp.supernews.com...
>
> There is an open AI for container libraries for Ada 200Y. The problem
> is, everyone is willing to write an interesting library, but there is
> much less enthusism for the hard work it takes to make something
> suitable for standardization. (Compare the documentation for the typical
> library with the RM for Ada.Strings.Fixed, and you'll see what I mean).
> Then, compound that with getting everyone to agree on the requirements
> and the solution...
>