Re: Feb 17 - It was 20 years ago today...

[dirk@piefje.cs.kuleuven.ac.be (Dirk Craeynest)]

[Posting from my work account seems to fail, sorry if this is a
duplicate. -- dc]

> Dirk Craeynest wrote:
> > Monday February 17, 2003, marks the 20th anniversary of Ada as a
> > standardized language. On this day in 1983 the first Ada standard
> > ANSI/MIL-STD-1815A was published.

Jeffrey Carter <jrcarter@acm.org> writes:
> I don't wish to belittle the importance of the anniversary, but the
> first Ada standard was MIL-STD 1815, 1980 Dec 10 (Ada was born 1815
> Dec 10).

You are correct that the first "official" Ada reference manual was
published on December 10, 1980.

My copy of the Ada80 reference manual
- was printed by Springer-Verlag in Lecture Notes in Computer Science
  as issue number 106,
- with copyright 1980 by the United States Government,
  ISBN 3-540-10693-6 Berlin Heidelberg New York, and
  ISBN 0-387-10693-6 New York Heidelberg Berlin,
- is entitled "The Programming Language Ada - Reference Manual", with
  subtitle "Proposed Standard Document - United States Department of
  Defense".

Note the "Proposed Standard Document" in the subtitle.

This Ada80 language definition was "only" a US military standard, was
AFAIK never fully implemented, and has been non-trivially updated after
careful international review to finally result in the Ada83 standard
mentioned in my previous message.  So, exactly 20 years ago today,
Ada83 became both a military (MIL-STD) and a non-military (ANSI)
standard, which was as we all know later adopted unchanged by ISO as an
international standard.

Anyway, I just wanted to use this anniversary to propose we all spread
the message that Ada is very much alive and has a lot to offer!

Dirk