Re: Ada95 Should be a Multivolume ISO Standard. -- was Two ideas for the next Ada Standard

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

Bob Leif suggests

"My personal choice for the standard's group is ACM SigAda. I quite well
realize that the ACM is presently not a standards organization. However, the
ACM SigAda has the great advantage of being composed of Ada enthusiasts."

I strongly disagree with Bob Leif's suggestion. Yes, ACM SigAda is indeed
a great source of Ada enthusiasts. It is thus a good source of ideas for
language changes, and indeed during the Ada 95 process, many of the
suggestions for change originated from the language issues working group
of SigAda.

However, it is not a suitable group at all for generating formal changes
to the standard, since this is an activity that requires more than
enthusiasm. It requires a substantial expenditure of time (not something
SigAda volunteers are likely to be able to provide), and a lot of
experience in language design, and a VERY detailed knowledge of the
semantic issues in Ada.

The whole idea of a multi-volume standard for Ada is a bad one. it is
a recipe for changes getting into the language without adequate study
and care.

Much better is to keep the entire process of developing extensions to
Ada informal, as has been done very successfully with other languages
(note that C++ is not yet even a single volume ISO standard!)

Let's discuss ideas for changes, a good example is Tuck's with type
suggestion for solving the circular reference problem, agree on possible
approaches, and then prototype and experiment with these ideas using GNAT
(that's one of the things GNAT is intended to enable!)

Then if an idea seems like it is reasonable and has consensus, it can
be developed as an informally agreed on extension by the various vendors,
which will allow us to investigate possible implementation problems.

If there are no such problems, then eventually the feature may find its
way into the next version of the language, or it may still not, because
the whole point of a language revision is to study the coherence of 
various possible features. if all the good ideas for Ada 9X had been
added to Ada 83 one by one, we would have a horrendous mess on our hands.