Re: Ada culture & pictures.

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

<chrismiller677@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1126512087.368854.121520@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
> Why does the Ada community not use more pictures & graphics? Eh ?
>
> Think about it - the whole Ada culture seems obsessed with text. Page
> after page after page of boring text.
>
> Perhaps it all stems from the text based Ada Language Reference manual?

Pictures are pretty much irrelevant to standards work. Diagrams might make
sense in a few cases, but they're hard to fit into the ISO requirements,
they can't be searched for content, and they are hard to support in the many
different formats that the standard appears in. Moreover, Ada itself is a
text language, so there isn't any critical need to use non-text in the
standard.

Why there aren't more diagrams and pictures in tutorial and advocacy
information is something you'll have to ask the authors of those sites and
papers. Probably, they simply couldn't find anything appropriate to use.
(The only pictures that RRS has ever used was the almost cliched pictures of
rockets and airplanes. After all, what the heck does a compiler look like??)

> Some examples :
> - www.ada-auth.org. Home page, no pictures, all text. In fact I
> couldn't find any pictures on the entire Web site. (Can anyone else?)

You clearly didn't try hard enough. There are *lots* of pictures on
ada-auth.org. But they don't have much to do with Ada (they're recording our
various meetings). There are a couple of articles with diagrams in the grab
bag section. And of course the folder and file icons in the VCS are
"pictures". But the site is *very* vanilla, as it is intended for people
actively working on creating and/or implementing the Ada standard. There
isn't any money, time, or need for anything fancy. Anyone coming there that
isn't creating or implementing the Ada standard is probably in the wrong
place. Use www.adaic.org, www.adapower.com, or www.adaworld.com instead.

> - The holy grail. Ada 95 ref manual  & Standard Libraries. 543 pages. I
> gave up looking, the closest I came was the hierarchy of language-
> defined classes in section 3.2 12.

Let me assure you that there is no graphics of any kind in the Ada reference
manual (any version). There are a few tables, but the tools that create
these documents are purely for processing text. In any case, this is a
*reference* document; any value of it to promoting Ada is purely accidental.

As several others have said, please suggest and help provide the pictures
and diagrams that you think would be valuable. Those of us that are already
familar with the trees often have a hard time figuring out what makes it
hard for others to see the forest...

                               Randy.