Opportunity for Ada

Opportunity for Ada

[Bob Munck]

Friends,

There may be an excellent opportunity RIGHT NOW to make Ada much more
widely-used by non-military, non-government programmers.  Sun has just
announced a significant enhancement to the capabilities of the World
Wide Web called HotJava, essentially a C++ equivalent of the old UCSD
Pascal P-System.  If we could make Ada available as an alternative to
C++ in this system, it might become very widely used very quickly.

As with the P-System, HotJava is basically a compiler that produces
code meant to be interpreted.  The idea is that WWW browsers will
include an interpreter, so that WWW servers can send out executable
programs that cannot (!!) violate client security because they are
interpreted.  The programs will be able to animate the display, handle
user input, and generally do a number of things that will make the
user interface much richer and more interesting.

Sun has written such a browser, and distributes it for free.  Among
the demonstrations that they provide are an animation of several
sorting algorithms, a tic-tac-toe game, mixed animation and music
displays, and a simple 3D output package that lets you rotate
wire-frame objects in three-space with your mouse.

My suggestion is obvious: retarget GNAT to the HotJava interpretable
code.  Sun seems to have taken liberties with the C++ "standard"
already, and there are messages on their mailing list saying "As long
as we're changing C++, let's change the following 321 features, all of
which I really hate!"  A usable Ada alternative could be grabbed by
everybody out there doing WWW stuff (potentially a great many people)
who doesn't like C++.


For much more detail and a copy of the HotJava browser, see

           http://java.sun.com/

My apologies if this has already been brought up; my main newsfeed and
all three alternative news sources available to me are simultaneously
down.  If you respond, please email me a copy.

My ulterior motive:  I'll probably be doing a lot of HotJava
programming, and I don't want to have to learn C and C++.  

Bob
munck@interramp.com
munck@STARS.Reston.UnisysGSG.COM 

Re: Opportunity for Ada

[Gregory Aharonian]

>My suggestion is obvious: retarget GNAT to the HotJava interpretable
>code. 

	Sounds like a great idea.  How about convincing Unisys to spend
some of its own money investing in this great commercial opportunity?
Certainly there should be some money left over from all of the STARS pork
that Unisys received.
	Unfortunately, I know your management's response:  "Benefits to
the country - great!  But what are the costs to Unisys to support such an
effort, and what the benefits to Unisys?".  
	You guys have been spending other people's money on Ada too long.
In fact, why not quit Unisys, put your money where your mouth is, and form
a company to provide Ada HotJava?  I hope you have a really big pension.

Greg Aharonian

Re: Opportunity for Ada

[Robert Dewar]

Interesting. If Greg's view of the proper behavior of companies is that
they should only consider the general welfare, not their own profit, then
why not apply it closer to home. Just think, if Greg spent all the effort
he spends on complaining about Ada policies, and instead worked on the
HotJava stuff (which is indeed a nice idea), perhaps he really could make
a contribution, 

and GASP! he might actually make some money, but he shouldn't worry about
that anyway, because it is apparently inconsistent with his view of
proper corporate policy :-)