Re: What if Red had won? [Or Blue?]

["J-P. Rosen" <rosen@adalog.fr>]

Le 18/07/2013 07:48, Shark8 a écrit :
> I remember reading that the Red team did do the brunt of the 9X
> revision, though this is the first I've heard about Ichbiah resigning
> in disgust. The addition of tagged-types was fairly well-done, I
> think (as in consistent w/ records to a fairly high degree) but I
> don't know of anything that was so egregious as to cause disgust...
> except, perhaps, one thing that [IIRC] Randy mentioned in a
> discussion of generics: they cannot be instantiated solely upon the
> formal parameters matching.
> 
> Do you know what things, in particular, he didn't like about the
> language's direction?

This happened at the Salem meeting. There was a huge debate about a very
minor syntactic point (I think it was more or less about using "tagged"
vs. "class", not sure). Both Tuck and Jean made passionate arguments
about this, and eventually Tuck won by one vote. When he saw the result,
Jean packed his stuff, said "Ada and I, it's over", and left the room,
not to be seen again. (Note: I was sitting next to him when this happened).

My personal interpretation is that his leaving was not really caused by
this very minor point, nor by any "disgust", but by the question of
whether Ada 95 was Ichbiah's language with some modifications by Taft,
or if it was becoming Taft's language. When it turned out to be the
second option, he left. He was not the kind of guy who would accept
sharing the fame.

-- 
J-P. Rosen
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