Re: Ada ad in Embedded Systems Programming stinks

[dag@control.lth.se (Dag Bruck)]

>>>>> "R" == Robert Dewar <dewar@cs.nyu.edu> writes:

R> THe issue of how accessible defining documents should be is an
R> interesting one. I am one of the relatively few people who got to
R> know the Algol-68 revised report thoroughly. At that level of
R> knowledge, it is a superb document, extremely precise, very
R> complete, and very accessible.

R> However, the great majority of people found it completely
R> inpenetrable, and it clearly contributed to the demise of the
R> language.

Have you seen the Draft International Standard for Modula-2?

If nothing else will kill Modula-2, this document will!  More
seriously, the Modula-2 standard mixes natural language and VDM-SL (a
formal specification language), and I think the mix is totally
incomprehensible.  The last statement is of course also a statement on
my level of education.

By the way, the reference manual has grown from some 30 pages to about
600 pages, and is bigger than the DIS for Ada 9X.

					-- Dag Bruck