Re: How to get Ada to ?cross the chasm??

[Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com>]

On Thu, 10 May 2018 17:05:59 -0700, Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>
declaimed the following:

>
>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.
>

	Remember though, that there was a competition with different teams
offering their take on answering the DoD requirements -- so in that sense
Green is what fell out of the various ideas <G>; and between the winning
Green and Mil-Std 1815 (not 1815A, I'm talking the Dec 1980 standard that
so many seem to forget about) were no doubt some changes made under DoD
suggestion/review.

	All my references are currently in storage (I'm slowly moving across
the county) or I'd maybe have a bit more of that history (in my viewpoint).

	From the foreword to 1815A (hmm, looks like Adobe Reader can OCR the
page images, if a bit imperfectly) reads "Ada is the result of a collective
effort to design a common language tor programming large scale and reek
time systems." (for "tor" read "for" and for "reek" read "real-")

{I hesitate to go further as that foreword is loaded with names of
participants still active here}

>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 .
>

	Hmmm, even that article ignores the three years from Mil-Std 1815 to
1815A. However -- I do wonder how much of that matter could be traced to
the concurrent (to Steelman) STONEMAN requirements from the DoD for an Ada
Programming Support Environment interacting with concepts for the Ada
language itself.
	
>> 	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.

	Well -- so was my senior year when I had that comparative language
course <G>; it is based upon the final Green language proposal, published
nearly a year before Mil-Std 1815.



-- 
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
	wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/