Re: Ada++

[Optikos <ZUERCHER_Andreas@outlook.com>]

On Thursday, May 28, 2020 at 10:45:48 PM UTC-5, Optikos wrote:
> On Thursday, May 28, 2020 at 5:33:15 PM UTC-5, Jerry wrote:
> > Ada++. YABL? Please discuss.
> > http://www.adapplang.com/
> 
> Please forgive me for being from another planet, but for what does the B of YABL stand?
> Yet Another ________ Language
> botched?
> fatherless-son -ized?
> 
> Quite honestly, I think it is a YAAL:  yet another Algol language like so many others because its roadmap
> so far seems to focus on yet another syntax for the same old stuff that we all have been regurgitating
> slightly differently since Algol60.
> 
> In mild support of their efforts, I would suggest that the Ada++ team go digging deep into old SIGADA
> and Tri-Ada academic papers at dl.acm.org (which are nearly all available at no-charge until 30 June
> 2020 due to Covid-19).  There are multiple old critiques and could-have would-have should-have
> alternative viewpoints of alternate Ada language variants that were passed over, including some variants
> that would have achieved another Steelman requirement or two that Ada chose not to do and that the Air
> Force's reviews trimmed out of Ichbiah's original more-expansive vision for Ada.  The article below is the
> biggest inventory of alternate variants of Ada that were discarded as proposed Green morphed into mil
> standard Ada post-Steelman (and quite honestly before that and after that in this exhaustive inventory). 
> Plus the Ada++ team should search for the great multitude of mentionings here on c.l.a of what a
> next-gen Ada would fix in rusty musty crusty older parts of Ada that are less admired nowadays than
> Ichbiah & HOLWG considered crucial back in the 1970s.  Hint:  more radical semantic maturations than
> mere syntactic doo-dads here & there.  For example, greater amounts of orthogonality such as constant
> members of records as required in Steelman 3-3F.  As another example, resurrection of the old a.app
> Ada-interpreter-within-the-Ada-compiler that was in DEC/Sun Ada compilers (which itself was Ada's
> rethink of PL/I's #PL/I interpreter within PL/I compiler), then drastically extending a.app's capabilities for
> multistage programming beyond OCaml-P4's.
> 
> https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/989791.989792

In addition to the prose summary linked above, here is a much more fine-grained list of when features of Green or Ada were added or taken away.  It is available without cost until 30 June 2020.  Ada++ could revisit a great multitude of these decisions, some of which were from design-by-committee HOLWG reviewers not from Ichbiah's mastermind vision/intent.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/24611.24614