Re: ARG asks Ada Community for API Proposals.

[Dale Stanbrough <dale@cs.rmit.edu.au>]

Marin David Condic wrote:

> Not a bad idea, but a granularity of 10 years is not going to make Ada very
> reactive to changing needs. I'd imagine an update cycle of 1 year being
> about as long as it ought to go. Also, you'd want to consider that some
> sections of the library might be highly stable while other sections might go
> through more revisions/extensions. Would it be better to maintain them all
> as separate things rather than house them all under an "Ada03" or "Ada04"
> root? It might be more conducive to maintaining multiple versions/levels of
> libraries with substantially different capabilities.

The idea was to base the naming convention based on the version of the
language required to run the software. For example you could not use the 
requeue facility under Ada83, so it would have to be placed under an 
Ada95 package hierachy (whereas software that didn't could be placed 
under an Ada83 package hierachy :-).

This is not denying the need to be able to produce many revisions of
the same software.

For example you may have

   Ada95.Containers.Protected_Lists

which could require the requeue feature of Ada95 going through
multiple revisions. the Ada95 name only says "you need to compile
this with an Ada95 compiler".

If Ada05 introduces the reserved word "discombobulate", then clearly
none of the packages under Ada95 hierachy could use it.

The benefit of this is that replacement packages  could be created
relying on new language features, and all it would take for a client
to use the new library would be to change "Ada95" to "Ada05".

Dale