Re: ADA Popularity Discussion Request

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Marin David Condic" <nobody@noplace.com> wrote in message
news:4121FFF1.80404@noplace.com...
> Again, more good news. Vector and matrix math included as a standard
> annex of some form would add functionality & help encourage people to
> make use of Ada. Personally, I think there is enough grist for the mill
> in the area of mathematics that there could be a lot more than just
> vector and matrix functionality added. As the item you cite observes,
> the packages can be implemented in "pure" Ada and hence should pose no
> problems to adoption.
>
> I'd disagree where it says: "Providing secondary standards has not
> proved satisfactory because they are not sufficiently visible to the
> user community as a whole." Maybe historically, and to a point. The
> question is "Would people use a secondary standard if it was blessed by
> Ada and included with most/all compilers?"

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.