Re: Is Ada likely to survive ?

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

Brian says

<<The fact that few seem to be working on extending Ada is certainly
unfortunate IMO. Perhaps as we develop more experience with GNAT the
situation will change. But I think the comparison here isn't completely
fair. How much creative energy is going into extending the ISO Prolog
standard, for example, compared to that going into extending Ada? ;-)
>>

I strongly disagree. Putting lots of work into extending Ada (at the 
language level) is not the most effective use of time. It is of course
entertaining to do, and one would hope that, particularly in academic
circles, there are those willing to play with language extensions
(hopefully using GNAT to prototyp them).

But in terms of serious use of the language, frequent extension and adding
of features is not very helpful. Far better is to work on the infrastructure,
i.e. bindings, reusable libraries, the knolwedge base of how to use Ada
effectively etc. Occasionally new pragmas and attributes may be useful,
but full fledged language changes and extensions carry a heavy burden of
proof to be worth considering.

Sure there are lots of people playing with ways to extend Prolog (it is
very weak in some areas, and sure needs extension -- I still remember 
the presenter at the fifth generation conference in Tokyo saying that
they were looking at prolog, and it looked very good except in the areas
of modularity and abstraction, but never mind, they would add these features.
TO my taste, these "features" still have not been effectively "added" to
Prolog (actually the idea of modularity and abstraction as add on features
strikes me, and struck me at the time in tokyo, as a big ludicrous.)

I do not however think that this "playing around" with the language is
particularly helpful to the serious use of prolog.