From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,b47b15fda2aeb0b2 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: Two ideas for the next Ada Standard Date: 1996/09/04 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 178429681 references: <50aao3$3r88@news-s01.ny.us.ibm.net> <322B5BB0.422E@joy.ericsson.se> <50gt4b$13lg@info4.rus.uni-stuttgart.de> organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-09-04T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Peter said "GNAT is indeed an excellent product which is now reaching maturity. I am working with it and do appreciate it very much. I am sharing your opinion above and I consider Robert's reaction all too natural and well understandable as a business requirement from his point of view: Freezing Ada95 as long as possible :-) (this statement will certainly not shake him ;-)" On the contrary, we are in a much better position at ACT to react to changes in the language than our competitors are. After all GNAT is well ahead in being the only Ada 95 compiler to implement the full language including the annexes. If anything rapid change would benefit us if we took a very narrow view. However, we do not take such a narrow view. There are many reasons why it will be a while before a new Ada standard appears, if one ever does. It takes a long time to really learn what needs to be changed and what does not. Many people in this forum make suggestions before they fully understand the issues, which is perfectly fine, but is not a useful part of a formal discussion of the requirements for a future standard. It is fine to have informal discussions, but of necessity the Ada standard will be stable for at least a decade, so the important thing to realize is that discussions of possible changes to Ada 95 have pretty mjuch zero impact on the real problems of how to get Ada 95 programs working (but not to worry, most of the people I know actually working on Ada 95 programs are not reading CLA anyway :-) My point was simply that there is no point in trying to regard these discussions as somehow being part of teh formal process that might eventually lead up to the next standard. For one thing that is far too restrictive. Note that one of the purposes of GNAT is to encourage experimentation with the language, so one thing that I hope will happen is that we will see announcements of actual experiments that take advantage of this. For example, it would be nice to see a CLA post that said "I think Ada should have multiple inheritance using the notation type x is new A and new B with .... and on xyz internet site, you can get a version of GNAT that implements this concept -- please play with it and see what you think." The other thing to avoid is the broken record phenomenon. New people will wander into the Ada fold over time, and will send messages saying things like "gee I don't like the p(a) notation, I prefer a.p", and it would be nice to simply be able to refer people to a CLA archive with some apporpriate thread references. Is anyone maintaining anything approaching such an archive.