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From: J Kimball <spam@example.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Augusta: An open source Ada 2012 compiler (someday?)
Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2014 18:50:18 -0500
Organization: Jacob Sparre Andersen Research & Innovation
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Xref: news.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:18959
Date: 2014-03-24T18:50:18-05:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

On 03/24/2014 06:18 PM, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
> On Mon, 24 Mar 2014 16:21:20 -0500, "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>
> declaimed the following:
>
>> "J Kimball" <spam@example.com> wrote in message
>
>>
>>> Ada has become the American tax code. It's becoming abundantly clear
>>> that there has to be a massive break in backward compatibility in the next
>>> revision of the language that makes writing compilers easier, not just
>>> keeping
>>> AdaCore in business, but breaking out of the framework of Ada 95.
>>
>> I'd be in favor of that, but I'm dubious that the customers that support Ada
>> would want to make that sort of change. And if the customers don't come
>> along, then there is little energy for anything to happen. After all, most
>> hobbyest driven projects tend to wane after a couple of years, and that's
>> not going to work for the sorts of long-lived projects that Ada is best at.
>>
>
> 	Aye; The paying customers aren't going to put up with the cost of
> recertifying something like a flight management system because a language
> revision has dropped support for some feature (or just made a small change
> in the semantics of existing syntax). And such systems may be in use for
> 20+ years.
>
> 	I think I've overheard stuff at work where they are talking about
> having to do side-by-side examination of the generated object code to
> validate a new release of the compiler -- without changing the language
> standard in use.
>

Why would an ATCS system change language revision at all? Anyone whose using features they don't want to give up can safely stay with old revisions of the language. GNAT has had those -gnat{83,95,05,12) switches for a long time. These are not valid reasons for not shaking things up. Even if some project decided to leave Ada, you may just as easily find new people approaching the language. Large projects who think just changing the switch in their Makefile to the new language revision is sufficient probably shouldn't be using Ada in the first place.