Re: The disturbing myth of Eiffel portability

[pcg@aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi)]

>>> "jsa" == Jon S Anthony <jsa@alexandria> writes:

piercarl> Ahhh, but it's not as simple as that. In part because it's
piercarl> often not clear what is the ``current'' incarnation of a
piercarl> language; in part because, and that was my main point
piercarl> w.r.t. to the Eiffel-Eiffel 3 distinction, to me Eiffel 3 is
piercarl> logically a branch on the Eiffel descendancy tree, not a
piercarl> linear descendant, and that continuining to call it ``Eiffel''
piercarl> is thus somewhat misleading, for it implies a degree of
piercarl> continuity that is not there.

jsa> I would tend to disagree with this.  Probably in general, but
jsa> certainly for the two particular cases mentioned.  There is really
jsa> no issue or problem or whatever concerning what is the current
jsa> "incarnation" of either Ada or Eiffel.

Again, the issue, is whether we are discussing ``Ada'' the language or
"Ada" the label. Your argument here is that the name is used nowadays
officially to indicate the more recent language of that name:

jsa> For Ada, ISO/IEC 8652:1995 explicitly refers to: "Information
jsa> Technology -- Programming Languages -- Ada".  Pretty clear.  For
jsa> Eiffel, the direct analogue is "Eiffel The Language", which does
jsa> not say "Eiffel-3 The Language" or whatever.

Too bad. To me that is both misleading and counterproductive, as argued
later, for I don't think that in either case there is a indeed:

jsa> In both cases there is a _great_ deal of continuity there and I
jsa> don't see anything particularly misleading about the unqualified
jsa> names.

Well, to me Ada 83 and Ada 95 are very different languages, rather more
so than F77 vs. F90, for example; to a large extent one could argue that
the differences between Ada 83 and Ada 95 are almost as large as those
between ``C'' and ``C++'', and surely way more fundamental than those
between say C++ 1.x (nee` C84 apparently) and C++ 3.x; roughly
equivalent to those between Modula 2 and Modula 3, perhaps.

In particular I see a great deal of PR value in underlining that Ada 95
is a rather different beast in scope and possibilities from Ada 83, in
part because Ada 83 has not been a roaring success, and it has suffered
a reputation as a not-quite OO language. After all Ada 95 *is* a greatly
improved language, and that should be stressed, both for accuracy and
for expediency.

For the Eiffel-Eiffel 3 case it is some vital details of the language,
rather than its scope as in the ``Ada'' case, that have changed greatly,
turning it into a far more industrial strength tool than before. I have
seen some rather strong complaint in this newsgroup in recent times
about the limitations of Eiffel/Eiffel 2, and these limitations _have_
been repaired in Eiffel 3 (at the cost of a considerable loss in
eelgance, but then that seems patently irrelevant for market success).

Again, given that Eiffel 3 is greatly improved over Eiffel/Eiffel 2,
which did suffer from some important limitations, underlining the
difference seems expedient, not just correct.

Yes, Ada 95 includes (mostly) as a subset Ada 83; and Eiffel 3 includes
(mostly) as a subset Eiffel; but the extensions (OO, low level
facilities) are rather more essential than incidental, in both cases.

Thus in summary in both cases the programming styles and/or the scope of
applications possible in Ada 95 and Eiffel 3 wrt to their predecessors
are so vastly different that pretending there is substantial continuity
as in using identically the same name as the previous version is not
just misleading but counterproductive.

Let's be facetious: a bit as if the Ford Mondeo had been instead named
the Edsel 92 (or whatever year it was introduced), or perhaps as if the
32 bit Microsoft OS had been called Windows NT to underline a tenuous
link with Windows 3 :-).