Re: Ada Common Environment (ACE)

Re: Ada Common Environment (ACE)

[Robert C. Leif, Ph.D.]

To: Bob Mathis et al.
From: Bob Leif

At 10:07 PM 7/16/96 EDT, you wrote:
>Ada Resource Association Begins Program to Standardize
>How Ada is Used and Implemented with External Services
>
>Coordination With Vendors Designed to Make Ada the Most Portable Language
>
>Press Contact:  Art Stewart (617) 641-1225
>E-mail:  ArtStewart@aol.com
>
>Technical Contact:  Bob Mathis (614) 538-9232
>E-mail:  73313.2671@compuserve.com
>
>
>(July 16, 1996 -- Columbus, OH)  The Ada Resource Association (ARA), the
>professional trade association engaged in meeting the expanding requirements of
>the worldwide Ada user community, has begun a program that will standardize how
>Ada is used and implemented with external services.
>
>The Association has formed the Ada Common Environment (ACE), which will
>coordinate with Ada compiler and tools vendors to ensure that all Ada
>implementations support standard external interfaces.  The ARA's intention
is to
>build on the new international standard for Ada95 -- which provides many
>facilities for integrating multi-language software systems -- with the goal of
>making Ada the most portable language in software development.

SNIP
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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.   I believe that your and others' excellent standards
creation activities are a very good argument for making Ada a multivolume
ISO standard. This will provide the flexibility to add Annexes, as needed,
and in addition will add the capacity to react in a timely manner to
unforseen problems, such as the call-back problem Ada 83 had with both
Microsoft and X windows.

Yours,
Bob Leif

Robert C. Leif, Ph.D., PMIAC,
Vice President & Research Director
Ada_Med, A Division of Newport Instruments
Tel. & Fax (619) 582-0437

Re: Ada Common Environment (ACE)

[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

Re: Ada Common Environment (ACE)

[Bob Mathis]

Bob Leif suggested:

>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.   I believe that your and others' excellent standards
>creation activities are a very good argument for making Ada a multivolume
>ISO standard. This will provide the flexibility to add Annexes, as needed,
>and in addition will add the capacity to react in a timely manner to
>unforseen problems, such as the call-back problem Ada 83 had with both
>Microsoft and X windows.

The Ada industry wants to respond in a timely manner and that's what ACE
is about. Making this part of the ISO standard is a different issue. Over
the 14 years I've been involved with ISO, their approach to interpreting,
adding to, or changing standards has been evolving. I think there will be
even larger changes in the next couple of years.

Bob has made his suggestion about annexes before and the WG9 group is
aware of it. ASIS is a separate work item which would normally mean a
separate standard, but not necessarily. In this case, determining how it
is to be published should be considered as it comes nearer to approval.

-- Bob Mathis
Executive Director, Ada Resource Association
Convener, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22 WG9 Ada

Re: Ada Common Environment (ACE)

[Michael Feldman]

In article <960722142538_73313.2671_FHM39-3@CompuServe.COM>,
Bob Mathis  <73313.2671@COMPUSERVE.COM> wrote:

>The Ada industry wants to respond in a timely manner and that's what ACE
>is about. Making this part of the ISO standard is a different issue. Over
>the 14 years I've been involved with ISO, their approach to interpreting,
>adding to, or changing standards has been evolving. I think there will be
>even larger changes in the next couple of years.

This all sounds very good. I really hope the Ada industry really does
respond in a timely manner; Ada has been overtaken by events so many
times... I keep hoping it won't happen again.

Mike Feldman