Re: Strawman,woodenman and tinman

[evans@evans.pgh.pa.us (Arthur Evans Jr)]

In article <6id35l$27e1@news.ida.org>, dwheeler@ida.org wrote:

> "Strawman" was the first version of the requirements;
> it was distributed within the military departments and to a lesser extent
> in the academic community and industry.

Pretty close.  In the early 70s DoD was concerned about the
proliferation of high order languages (HOLs) and created a Working Group
to study the problem.  HOLWG distributed within DoD a draft requirements
document, solicited responses, and received almost nothing.  In mid-1975
they put out another version called the Strwaman Requirements which was
sent to groups within DoD and to selected DoD contractors.  I had just
gone to work at Bolt Beranwek and Newman, and my boss gave me a copy,
said some sort of response was called for, and asked me to draft one.

Anyone even moderately competent at language design recognized that the
requirements were self-contradictory and, given the then state of the
art, vastly over ambitious; I said so.  Later, I learned that Strawman
had been deliberately written that way in order to elicit responses from
people (like me) who were perfectly happy to point out how DoD didn't
understand the problem, but who probably wouldn't otherwise have
bothered replying.  (Clever!  I think Dave Fisher gets credit for that
idea)

 [snip]

> Tinman was then developed.  An official reference for this document is:
 [snip]

After Tinman came out, there was a conference at Cornell at which
position papers were presented on it.  The procedings were published:

    Design and Implementation of Programming Languages
    DoD Sponsored Workshop, Ithaca 1976
    Lecture Notes in Computer Science #54
    Springer-Verlag

This book is not likely in print, but many libraries have complete
collections of this series.  The book includes a complete copy of Tinman
as an Appendix.

Art Evans

Arthur Evans Jr, PhD
Ada Consulting