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From: Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>
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Subject: Re: How to get Ada to ?cross the chasm??
Date: Thu, 10 May 2018 17:05:59 -0700
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Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com> writes:
>>> "Designed by committee"		(so was COBOL and it lasted)
> 	All my quoted comments were paraphrases (hey, it's been nearly
> 40 years, my memory isn't that perfect) of statements seen already
> back in 1980.

Oh ok, I thought you were referring to more recent discussion on this
thread.  But I've always thought the claim that Ada (83) was designed by
committee was bogus, because it was in fact designed by Jean Ichbiah.

I've on the other hand seen it claimed that Ada was (my interpretation)
rescued from oblivion by none other than Richard Stallman, who freaked
out at the proposal to make GNAT part of the GNU project, because Ada as
then envisioned couldn't accomodate separate compilation.  Jean Ichbiah
had instead decided there had to be a library of compiled packages that
the compiler had to access while compiling, which made the order in
which separate modules were compiled critical.  After discussions with
Stallman, Bob Dewar then came up with a way to allow Ada packages to be
compiled separately from each other, and everyone uses that scheme
today.  See: http://www.ada2012.org/files/Thoughts_on_Ada.pdf .

> 	For my comparative language course (so small we met in a conference
> room) I used [shortened]  https://www.amazon.com/dp/0137306970

Thanks!  That book is from 1980 though.  I'll keep looking at the online
Ada 2012 stuff for now.