Re: New Ada Standard

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Stephen Leake" <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org> wrote in message
news:uzm5pahon.fsf@stephe-leake.org...
> "Jeffrey D. Cherry" <ffej.yrrehc@stepbfav.moc> writes:
>
> > ... If it is, then should I be calling this the Ada07 standard?
>
> The ISO working group on Ada agreed that the common vernacular for the
> 2007 version should be Ada 2005. See the post in this newsgroup
> recently (I searched for Ada05 in comp.lang.ada at
> http://groups.google.com/advanced_group_search?hl=en):

This is not an accurate summary of the WG 9 action. The WG 9 vote was
intended to apply to the name during the development period (that is, up to
standardization). After that, of course, the name of the language is Ada.

> The rationale for this choice is that a lot of people have been
> calling it Ada 2005 for a while, and there's no real harm in
> continuing. The GNAT compiler has an option -ada05, for example, which
> is not going to change to -ada07.

The only rationale was that we were hopelessly deadlocked on the issue. But
there had to be some resolution (in that *something* had to go into the
documents), and the people who were against using "Ada 2005" did not feel as
strongly as some of those who wanted to stick with it. And in any case, the
decision made there is not binding on anyone for purposes other than
official WG 9 purposes (and even there, it should be avoided in favor of
more precise identification of standards).

There are a lot of good arguments for changing the name now as was done with
Ada 95 (especially that older articles which reference obsolete drafts of
the language would not confuse readers with misinformation); there are also
good arguments for staying the course (it doesn't make sense to dilute Ada's
marketing).

In any case, the best choice is to call it "Ada"; it's now the standard and
should be the default on new compilers (it certainly will be on Janus/Ada).
If you need to reference the standard itself, that is "Amendment 1" (there
is no standard document that includes the complete language; you have to
merge three of them to get that, or use Ada Europe's consolidated standard -
which isn't official anyway). You might need year numbers to talk about
obsolete Ada versions like Ada 95, but not about the current one.

                                  Randy.