Re: Ada Common Environment (ACE)

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Robert Leif said

"This sounds very good.  I believe that ACE will be very useful. However, it
still would make sense to be able to formally include ACE, ASIS, and other
standards in Ada as Annexes in less than 11 or so years before the next
language revision."

Appropriate items can perfectly well be standardized independent of the
RM, as for example the numerics were for Ada 83.

By the way, you misunderstand ACE completely if you think of it as being
anything *like* a standard that could be standardized at the ISO level.
It is much more informal than this, and the whole idea is to agree on
a level of commonality that will be useful without going through the
standardization process.

For example, it would take years to standardize a binding to X, and for sure
the existing Intermetrics binding would require extensive changes before it
could be accepted as an ISO standard, especially when X itself is not
standardized.

On the other hand, placing this binding in ACE is immediately useful, and can
be done without the long wait or the long term instability. What ACE achieves
in this case is the gauarantee that conforming compilers can compile and
execute the binding, but ACE (unlike a standards organization) does not need
to ensure that the design of this binding is absolutely correct and
appropriate.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies