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From: dirk@heli.cs.kuleuven.ac.be (Dirk Craeynest)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: A history question
Date: 11 Jan 2005 00:48:28 +0100
Organization: Ada-Belgium, c/o Dept. of Computer Science, K.U.Leuven
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Summary: Bell Labs said C could not meet the requirements.
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Date: 2005-01-11T00:48:28+01:00
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Mok-Kong Shen  <mok-kong.shen@t-online.de> wrote:
>According to http://www.cs.fit.edu/~ryan/ada/ada-hist.html
>HOLWG evaluated 23 existing languages against the Tinman
>requirements. C was not among these languages. Does anyone
>happen to know why? Thanks.

I quote from <http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~dirk/quotes.html>, roughly
half-way down the page with quotes:

    "When Bell Labs were invited to evaluate C against the DoD
    requirements, they said that there was no chance of C meeting the
    [STEELMAN] requirements of readability, safety, etc, for which
    we were striving, and that it should not even be on the list of
    evaluated languages.  We recognized the truth in their observation
    and honored their request."

    William H. Whitaker, Col, USAF (ret), "Ada - The Project: The
    DoD High Order Language Working Group", History of Programming
    Languages - II, ACM SIGPlan Notices, v.28, #3, March 1993, pg 314

I hope this helps.

Dirk (Dirk.Craeynest@cs.kuleuven.ac.be for Ada-Belgium/Europe/WG9 mail)

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