Re: Five Years After

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

"Simon Clubley" <clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> wrote in 
message news:p4alg9$ec0$1@dont-email.me...
...
> There is however a small core in the Ada language that could bring
> benefits elsewhere but without all the overhead of a full blown
> Ada implementation.

That was the original theory behind the Janus/Ada implementation (way back 
in 1981). We eventually abandoned it and commited to a full Ada 83 compiler 
mainly because Ichbiah did such a good job in using each feature to support 
the others. With the possible exception of tasking (and tasking isn't really 
optional in a multicore world), pretty much all of the remainder of Ada 83 
is needed in order to make a solid core.

Otherwise, one ends up having to design replacements for expensive to 
implement features like up-and-down type resolution (needed to support 
overloading on result types, and without that, you will have a lot of issues 
with operator overloading), generics, finalization (if you are dealing with 
Ada 95), and more.

                           Randy.