Re: Ada lacks lighterweight-than-task parallelism

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

On Thursday, June 21, 2018 at 9:42:44 AM UTC-5, Shark8 wrote:
> On Thursday, June 21, 2018 at 3:09:26 AM UTC-6, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
> > On 2018-06-21 02:19, Shark8 wrote:
> > > On Wednesday, June 20, 2018 at 7:38:11 AM UTC-6, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
> > >> On 2018-06-20 15:14, Mehdi Saada wrote:
> > >>> So I guess you are in favor with deeper (and de facto) integration of compilers with static
> > >>> analysis tools ?
> > >>
> > >> Absolutely. Not as tools. SPARK must become an integral part of Ada.
> > >> Static analysis and defined provable semantics is major strength of Ada.
> > >>
> > > Agreed; this is why I'm pushing for a heavily integrated IDE with my IDE-proposal.
> > > I'd be quite interested to hear your thoughts on the subject.
> > 
> > Why do you think that an IDE is important here? (Not that I will use 
> > emacs, ever! (:-))
> > 
> Integration.
> I don't mean "IDE" like the industry has come to think of it (editor + button-to-call-external-tool). /
> Think more like R-1000 on steroids, not GPS.
> 
> The integration that you're proposing isn't going to be happening on this revision of the language, BUT
> we can integrate it as closely as possible in the form of an IDE, acting /as if/ there were a requirement for
> such integration. (And indeed, the Ada spec requires a degree of this WRT static analysis currently, so it
> certainly is possible to integrate these things.)

In technology, if you name it & define it & then reify it then you own* it, even if the name existed before with a different definition and/or the definition existed before with a different name.  There are numerous examples strewn throughout computer history, of which here are 3:

1) RAII in C++ world is attributed to Boost community, but as much as 7 years prior it was commonly called “allocation in only constructors; deallocation in only destructors” but Marshall Kline et. al. did not reduce the mantra to a catchy acronym or initialism.

2) The term microcomputer was commonplace prior to the release of the IBM Personal Computer in 1981.  Nowadays we hardly hear the word microcomputer to refer to a PC, other than noting the Micro- of Microsoft refers to microcomputers.

3) The way of storing compiled Ada objects in R1000 also existed in Multics for PL/I a decade prior to R1000.  Then it was later reprised again a half-decade later than R1000 for C++ via ObjectStore.

* not in the patent or trademark sense, but in the mindshare & fame sense.  Well, on 2nd thought, actually mindshare and marketshare can lend itself well to establishing trademark in legal-world.

Shark8, you should pull open the thesaurus and name/define a next-generation replacement term for IDE.  Something like holistic development environment (HDE).  Indeed, there exists an archaic spelling of holistic that de-emphasises any misinterpretation of holistic as having anything to do with hole or holy**:  wholistic, emphasizing wholeness.  Plus wholistic would have very few collisions on Bing/Google searches.  Wholistic development environment (WDE).

A wise technology leader once told me:  if you need to explain yourself in embattled debate (e.g., no, •this• IDE, not •that• IDE), then you have already lost the argument.

** New-age people misinterpret the root-word of holistic as holy, not as whole from before the time that English's spelling was fully settled.