Re: Your wish list for Ada 202X

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

"Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote in message 
news:o55d8h8hmzjb.591frxr75ryx$.dlg@40tude.net...
> On Wed, 26 Mar 2014 16:06:18 -0500, Randy Brukardt wrote:
>
>> Commenting here is precisely the problem.
>
> But people don't post/read AI and Ada-Comment preferring c.l.a because
> Usenet group is more comfortable and easier to use for discussions and
> informal exchange.
>
> If you want to make Ada-Comment more vital move it to Usenet, Web group
> etc. Though, isn't it so that Ada-Comment and AI are meant to be
> unwelcoming in order to filter traffic?

I wouldn't characterize it as "meant to be unwelcoming"; after all, it was 
pretty much state-of-art when it originally was defined (in the early 1990s, 
for Ada 9x). It just hasn't changed much since then (last major change was 
in 1998, when I took over hosting it). The AI mechanism is even older; it's 
pretty similar to the mechanism used during Ada 83, so it dates back to at 
least the mid-1980s. The only major change there is the online formatted 
access to them (I added that a few years back), and as that is done by 
automatically adding formatting to plain text documents, it's not perfect.

But it is true that we don't want lots of chit-chat on Ada-Comment. 
Everything said there goes into the permanent record somewhere, so off-topic 
stuff would become a problem. (That's the major reason that I still file 
these messages by hand; it's hard to imagine an automated system that could 
do as good a job of putting messages where they belong. We also do a level 
of triage on the comments, putting queries that are adequately answered 
on-line into ACs where they don't clutter the ARG's agenda. [Originally, 
everything posted to Ada-Comment had to be handled as an AI, which meant 
there was always a bunch of junk AIs on the agenda -- a lousy use of limited 
resources.)

> Shouldn't there be forums to discuss technical issues separately from
> fundamental language concepts, ignoring distracting technicalities?

I'm not sure how one could "discuss technical issues" without considering 
"distracting technicalities". That's kind of the point, after all -- not 
everything that makes sense in the abstract makes sense for Ada because it 
has to fit into the existing type system somehow -- even ignoring absolute 
compatibility. For instance, a lot ideas don't make sense for by-copy types, 
or by-reference types, or discriminated types -- and those things are surely 
going to exist in a future Ada.

We've occassionally talked about using other sorts of forums, but that tends 
to conflict with the mandate for a permanent record that's not tied to a 
particular technology [as technologies disappear over time -- but we still 
go back into the archives to understand old issues from time-to-time (it's 
too bad to we don't have the Ada 83 discussions on line, although apparently 
they're in a series of boxes in John Goodenough's office -- on printouts --  
they're kinda hard to search).] For instance, a wiki might make sense for 
some tasks, but it doesn't appear that there would be any sensible way to 
extract the history from them for long-term use. You can do it using the 
platform, but when it goes away (and all of these things will go away 
someday, especially cloud platforms where you're dependent on others to keep 
it functioning) all of that is lost.

                                        Randy.