Re: Grace 0.51 released

[Nick Roberts <nick.roberts@acm.org>]

Stephen Leake wrote:

> I've made a new release of Grace, _the_ community Ada library :).
> Config_Files has been improved. See
> http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/grace/.
> 
> In the context of the long-lasting "yet another Ada library" thread,
> remember all the discussion a couple years ago about Grace? How many
> people have contributed? Two. 

Only one person has contributed to Tenet so far (me ;-)

> If we do get a community library going, let's at least use the name
> Grace (for Grace Hopper), and not CAL or whatever.

Or alternatively, let's call it 'Charles', or maybe 'ASCL', or 'Booch', or 
'PragmARC', or 'GAPSE', or 'AdaSL', or 'SAL', or 'Tenet', or ...

In fact, my guess is that it's going to be called 'Ada'. I believe the ARG 
are interested in introducing a basic set of containers into the next 
revision, although it might be in a an optional annex, and they might well 
simply decide not to (probably because of lack of time). If you're 
interested, please look at AI-302:

http://www.ada-auth.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/AIs/AI-10302.TXT

This proposal is huge, but it is currently undergoing revision to 
significantly reduce it. I think the proposal, submitted by Matthew Heaney 
and based on Charles, is basically very good.

The reason why I've not given up on Tenet yet is that, to my knowledge, 
no-one else is going to produce implementations of a list and a map that 
support clustering (dynamic storage in a linked list or tree of smallish 
arrays of the element type). If someone is able to correct me about this, 
I'd be very grateful. (For a start, I am not very familiar with the Booch 
collection.) Clustering affects the specification in a small but 
significant way: you need to be able to specify the clustering factor (the 
number of elements per array). As far as I'm concerned, clustering is going 
to be vital to the efficiency of my future projects.

The ARG follows the principle that 'the market should decide' about a 
particular technology before it is incorporated into the Ada standard. But 
it doesn't follow this principle (or any other principle) slavishly. I feel 
it is one possible reason why the ARG might reject any container proposal 
for the next revision, and to be honest I think that if they do they might 
be right. They will have to judge whether the benefits outweigh the risks.

Links to some of the the projects I mentioned are:

http://home.earthlink.net/~matthewjheaney/charles/

http://www.adapower.net/booch/

http://home.earthlink.net/~jrcarter010/pragmarc.htm

http://adasl.sourceforge.net/

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ramatthews/ [for GAPSE]

http://ascl.sourceforge.net/

http://tenet.berlios.de

I hope it won't seem out of place for me to say here that I write this with 
nothing but benign intent, and a lot of respect, toward the various people 
who have worked hard on their own container projects.

-- 
Nick Roberts