Re: What about Ada?

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

Daniel said

" That covers ISO, now try the DoD's standards that came before ANSI/ISO
 stuck their nose in it. Back when ACVC was responcible for determining
 whether or not a implementation was conforming, actually I think they still
 do this today maybe, although I doubt anyone checks to see whether it
 has thier OK or not. There aren't actually 10, maybe 5 or 6 different
 standards for Ada from its original implementation by the Dod up to
 today's ISO Ada 9X' [95' isn't it?]."

Well your unawareness of the current state of ACVC testing certainly shows
you are disconnected from recent history, and your claims about DoD's
standards shows you are disconnected from ancient history as well.

It's amazing how rumours like this spread with no basis in fact whatsoever.

The facts (who knows if mere facts are enough to encourage determined
ignorance :-) are that there was a military standard for Ada 83 (Mil Std 1815)
an ANSI standard, and an ISO standard, and they are all ABSOLUTELY IDENTICAL.

The Ada 83 ACVC suites (with which I believe I am as familiar as anyone!)
tested conformance to the earlier standard (doesn't matter which of the
three you are talking about since they are identical).

The Ada 95 ACVC suites (with which I am also quite familiar!) test conformance
to the Ada 95 standard (doesn't matter whether you choose the ISO standard
or the ANSI standard, again they are identical -- except for some very
minor presentation issues -- the ISO standard omits the paragraph numbers).

As I said before, compared to other languages, notably Pascal, where the
ISO and ANSI standards differ substantively, and Fortran, where there are
two co-existing standards, and wide spread use of a third non-standard
form (HPF), and COBOL, where there is widespread use of a non-standard
form (OOCOBOL), and C++ (where there is no standard), the standarization
of Ada is very clean and easy to understand.

P.S. I think there are also notional FIPS standards, probably for both
versions, but these are also identical, and in fact I believe are by
reference standards.

Bottom line, there have been precisely TWO standards for Ada, that's it!