Re: Teaching C/C++ from Ada perspective?

["Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net>]

On Friday, July 6, 2018 at 3:42:48 PM UTC-5, Maciej Sobczak wrote:
> _________ do not refer to Steelman, so why do you?

Because Steelman was one of the highest achievements in the history of humankind in defining a system of measurement for what is a software-engineering-facilitating programming language and what is not.

Do you have a suggestion for any other language-agnostic set of requirements that serves as a measuring stick for what is a software-engineering-facilitating programming language and what is not?

The -man series is clearly language agnostic, because no less than 6 quite-different programming languages were devised/modified to attempt to enact them, especially the final 2 refinements:  Ironman & Steelman.

Perhaps you haven't noticed:  the -man series of requirements to devise a measuring stick of what is and is not a software-engineering-facilitating programming language was not only intended to a monumental achievement in the history of Western Civilization (especially The West during the Cold War), but the -man series is intended to be a quite scientific-experiment approach to the topic.
1) Yellow, Blue, Red, and Green were the specimens being experimented upon as evolutionarily-divergent paths to undergo natural selection as survival of the fittest
and
2) Tartan and -75+15PL/I was the control group, pre-disqualifed from winning the natural-selection competition
and
3) the -man series of requirements specifications are the Darwinian stressor to kill off the weak in the natural selection.

C++ was in a legally-protected zoo of sorts, not subjected to this natural selection because of the legalistic fluke of the AT&T Consent Decree in the 1956 break-up of the AT&T monopoly.  We moderns forget that there were 2 break-ups of AT&T, not only the baby-Bell one in 1984, but also the one where AT&T lost NEC split from Western Electric, Nortel (nee Northern Electric) split from Western Electric, ITT's Caribbean-Islands telephone network split from AT&T, Bell Canada split from AT&T, and AT&T severing occupation-of-Japan ties with NTT.  But most especially, AT&T agreed (in the Consent Decree) with IBM and the federal government of the USA in the USA's federal court system to refrain from entering the computers-for-sale marketspace, both as hardware and as software.  For a period of time, AT&T was the largest computer company in the world, selling hardware & software only to itself.  It was during this time from 1956 to 1984 that AT&T developed C and C++ in isolation from the rest of the world, with only a rather few leaks of very restrictive* licenses to a few universities, such as University of California at Berkeley.

* to comply with the Consent Decree

So, Maciej, your logic regarding Steelman not being a measuring stick of the AT&T languages too is quite naïve and flawed:  the primary reason that AT&T's post-PL/I work (upon AT&T's MULTICS divorce from General Electric in 1969) on programming languages was omitted from the HOLWG competition (as perhaps a 5th color language) was because of the Consent Decree that absolutely no one wanted to touch, most especially AT&T, the federal government, and IBM.  There were multiple dozens of lawyers in the USA's federal government, who from the day that they graduated from law school as young men & women to the day that they retired in old age worked ••on only one case post-WWII••:  the 2 break-ups of AT&T from 1949 and 1984.  Of all the Big Deals affecting every aspect of technology in the 20th century, this was one of the Biggest of the Big Deals.

Any alternative measuring stick that you might purport to be another even remotely useful system of measurement of what is and what is not a software-engineering-facilitating programming language would need to meet or exceed that level of science that overtly appears as quite a crescendo in HOLWG's -man series of requirements.