Re: ADA Popularity Discussion Request

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

I would agree, but add this: It is not sufficient to simply create a 
secondary standard in a vacuum. This is why many independently developed 
libraries have failed to gain traction. If the vendors of Ada and the 
standard-makers of Ada and some large users of Ada were to get together 
and discuss "The Future Strategy For Ada" and agree on a direction & 
some basic content goals, perhaps something can be made to happen.

I can write a standard an put it on the Internet and say "Would some 
vendor please make this..." but what good does that do? I could write a 
library (I happen to have some of it in my back pocket) and put it on 
the internet and say "Would someone please incorporate this as part of 
Ada and circulate it with all compilers..." but people have done this 
already with only modest success. (Charles seems to be making its way 
into the standard, but my complaint is that it a) doesn't go far enough 
and b) won't get expanded/updated except on a ten year cycle.) Writing a 
standard for a library is probably not as practical as providing a 
reference implementation anyway. The "Standard" part should come from 
Ada's portability and everyone distributing the same thing rather than 
through a written document.

Expanding the possible future for Ada is best done with some major 
subset of the interested parties working *together* to an agreed-upon 
course of action. Independent efforts - while noble - are not as likely 
to get results.

MDC

Randy Brukardt wrote:
> 
> 
> It says that because of history. AI-296 is a slightly modified copy of a
> standard that has existed for roughly 10 years. When it came up for its 5
> year review, many of the people in the WG9 meeting (myself included) had
> never ever heard of it. There are no known implementations. It's clear that
> historically at least, secondary standards like this might as well not
> exist.
> 
> I think that the implementation rate will go from roughly 0% of all vendors
> to near 100% of all vendors simply by including it in the primary standard.
> 
> There have been exceptions to the rule that secondary standards are widely
> ignored (the original GEF and POSIX 5.a come to mind, but neither of those
> were ever supported by anywhere near 100% of the compilers), but for the
> most part, they just don't exist. That goes for users as well - after all,
> if users demanded support for the standard matrix library, vendors would
> have given it to them. But users are no more likely to look for and/or know
> about secondary standards than vendors are.
> 
> One hopes that an IWA on extending the containers libraries would be more
> like POSIX than the matrix stuff (and we intend that there is a set of
> agreed upon extensions for this containers), but there can be no guarantee
> of that.
> 
>                                Randy.
> 
> 
> 


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Marin David Condic
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