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

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

[Dirk Craeynest]

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.

We've come a long way since, and it hasn't always been easy.
But there's a lot of momentum in the international Ada community now.

While there are signs that global awareness of the importance
of reliable software is increasing, at the same time enthusiasm
within the Ada world is growing and new activities are springing
up to make Ada an even better language and even more suitable
for the task of cost effectively building and evolving demanding
applications in an ever changing world.  I refer among others to
the work done world-wide in ISO's WG9 and ARG on the evolution of
the Ada standard, the involvement of the Ada-Europe and ACM SIGAda
organizations to set up a light-weight infrastructure for managing
upcoming "de facto" standards for APIs and libraries (ala C++'s
STL), the increased interest in Ada-Europe's and SIGAda's annual
conferences (new people and companies attending and exhibiting,
more and good quality of submissions, etc.), increasing "on line"
activities in newsgroups (comp.lang.ada), mailing lists, and on
all kinds of web-sites with e.g. open source projects, and so on...

I would like to invite you all to help that momentum grow and to
share a bit of your Ada enthusiasm with friends and colleagues.
Contact or form local user groups, write and/or talk about your
professional or hobby projects, speak with professors at educational
institutes in your neighborhood, etc.

In short:
show the world that Ada is very much alive and has a lot to offer!

Dirk Craeynest
Dirk.Craeynest@cs.kuleuven.ac.be (for Ada-Belgium/Europe e-mail)

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

[Jeffrey Carter]

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.

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).

-- 
Jeff Carter
"Monsieur Arthur King, who has the brain of a duck, you know."
Monty Python & the Holy Grail

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

[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