Re: Your wish list for Ada 202X

["Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net>]

On Tuesday, March 25, 2014 4:41:16 PM UTC-5, Stoik wrote:
> I think that even a casual user of Ada should be able to influence somehow the new version of Ada. I wonder what is high on your list of wishes for Ada 202X?

High on my list of wishes for Ada 202X is for there to be a clear cattle-prod that is an over-arching guiding principle, instead of Ada 202X being merely a catch-all bag of rather-random miscellany.

Green, Red, etc color languages & Ada 1983's de facto over-arching guiding principle:
explore what ***programming-in-the-large*** needs to replace the plethora of DoD/NATO languages utilized in vehicular & munitions systems.  (Ada & C++ as Ada's dissenting counter-culture successfully taught the world to think bigger, more-disciplined thoughts and aspire to more-sophisticated designs that they would naturally have accomplished in mere Pascal or mere C.)

Ada 1995's de facto over-arching guiding principle:
import into Green Ada 1983 some of the features ***of Red and of C++***, especially OO.  If C++ utilized "Ada 1983 does right" as its mantra, then Ada 1995 effectively utilized "C++ done right" as its counter-mantra as rebuttal or rebuke of C++.

Ada 2005's de facto over-arching guiding principle:
***course-correction*** of Ada 1995 where the OO community criticized.  Although laudable in producing a splendid incremental evolution of Ada, this was a weak mission with merely incremental (i.e., defensive) feature-set.

Ada 2012's de facto over-arching guiding principle:
***dot each i and cross each t*** of Ada 2005.  Although again laudable in producing the best Ada yet, this an extraordinarily weak mission with the feeling that Ada is so mature that Ada will likely change very little from this point forward.

a potential Ada 202X's overt over-arching guiding principle:
A la OCaml & Fortress, rethink how much ***declarative statements*** can preclude imperative statements to make Ada more "math-like".
1) For example, Dmitry Kazahov's idea of setting the Ada 1983-to-2012's data declarations on a new infrastructural foundation of more-primitive declarations.  Perhaps this could permit more of an OCaml-like set of features, regarding type-inference and various "comprehensions", e.g., list-comprehension.
2) For example, providing a wiser not-metatemplate-programming rebuttal/rebuke to C++2011's metatemplate poor-man-functional-programming via kludges in C++ templates, as Round Two of Ada 1995's over-arching guiding mission of "C++ done right".
3) For example, expand Ada's set of programming genres beyond OO/runtime-polymorphic programming, procedural programming, generic/compile-time-parametric-polymorphic programming, parallel programming, etc to include, say, aspect-oriented programming declarations, functional-programming declarations, compile-time reflection to an Ada-like source-code-generating language (e.g., a.app rethought & expanded).