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

[Jeffrey Carter <spam.jrcarter.not@spam.not.acm.org>]

On 07/17/2013 10:48 PM, Shark8 wrote:
>
> 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?

In an interview, Taft said, "As it turned out, Jean and I had quite different 
views on how to design the object-oriented features of the updated language, and 
he ultimately left the project when it was decided to follow the design team's 
recommended approach."

(https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/223388/a-z_programming_languages_ada/?pp=3)

My recollection is that Ichbiah said the revision was creating "Ada with null." 
He wanted a notation that used the reserved word "class":

class type T is record ...

He objected to "tagged" as being about the way the concept was implemented, 
while "class" would be about the concept. He also objected to the placement of 
"tagged", and that this would result in too many reserved words in a row in 
things like "is abstract tagged limited private". And, as his phrase "Ada with 
null" would indicate, he objected to the "with null" notation for a type that 
added no new information to its parent. He preferred

class type Child is new Parent;

He wrote an open letter when he resigned explaining why, but I haven't had any 
luck finding it on line.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"I unclog my nose towards you."
Monty Python & the Holy Grail
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