Re: Your wish list for Ada 202X

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Stoik" <staszek.goldstein@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:ea073fca-c607-476c-8c0b-81e2da1686b1@googlegroups.com...
...
> Although Ada has a lot of nice features and is still better constructed 
> than
> some of the more popular languages, there is a lot that causes frustration
> for the users. I will comment on it more later on.

Commenting here is precisely the problem. Most of the user contacts that the 
ARG has is third-hand at best. (Combating that is one of the reasons I hang 
out here.) We really don't have the clear of an idea of what other Ada users 
want. I know I draw on my own experience far more than probably is healthy.

Moreover, we've been asking for years for users to show us the problems that 
they cannot solve with Ada (now Ada 2012), so that we can look at possible 
solutions. That's one of the major purposes of the Ada-Comment mailing list. 
A few people do that, but it's not many. You don't have to be a language 
designer to do that; indeed, we'd rather you didn't try to invent language 
features to solve the problem, since those ideas often obscure the actual 
problem. Of course, we might determine that Ada 2012 already can solve the 
problem sensibly - or that we don't consider it important enough - but 
problems that we don't hear about have a near 100% chance of not being 
addressed.

This is probably a good time to remind everyone that the Ada-Comment mailing 
list is open to everyone. It's for comments and discussion on the Ada 
language and it's Standard, not particular implementations of Ada. (Leave 
your gripes about AdaCore here, please. :-) You can find instructions about 
joining the list at 
http://www.adaic.org/resources/add_content/standards/articles/comment.html.

Of course, that is not to say that discussion here isn't useful when one 
wants to know if they are alone with a concern or the like. But please don't 
assume that just because something is said here it is going to get back to 
the ARG and have an impact on future language standards. (Occassionally, 
someone has taken a discussion here back to Ada-Comment, but no one ought to 
assume that will happen. If you really care, do it yourself!)

                                    Randy Brukardt, ARG Editor.