ARG asks Ada Community for API Proposals.

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

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The Ada Rapporteur Group (ARG) is the technical committee in charge of
proposing amendments to the language to WG9, the ISO working group on
Ada. The ARG has begun work on the next revision of Ada, planned for
2005. As part of this revision, there has been a lot of interest in the
Ada community for the standardization of reusable components and APIs to
existing services.

While the ARG will conduct (based on input from the Ada community) the
revision of the core language and annexes, it doesn�t have the resources
to develop proposals itself for the standardization of reusable
components or APIs. Standardization of components or APIs often will
best be accomplished with secondary standards rather than part of the
core language standard. The ARG will oversee the development of such
secondary standards, but this is best accomplished by cooperating with
external groups developing the substance of such standards.

Therefore, the ARG would like to ask the Ada community to submit
proposals for
the standardization of APIs. Proposals must include (at least) a set of
Ada specifications, and a semi-formal description of the semantics of
each declaration, such as can be found in the annexes of the Reference
Manual. Developing such proposals usually will require the formation of
formal or informal working groups.

The ARG will evaluate these proposals using a variety of criteria. For a
more detailed version of this announcement, including a (partial) list
of evaluation criteria, please see
http://www.adaic.org/news/call4apis.html.

         Randall Brukardt
         Editor, ISO/IEC JTC1 SC22 WG9 ARG