[Info-vax] September 6, 2016 - new Roadmap and State of the Port updates now on VSI website

[Dirk Munk]

Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2016-09-08, Stephen Davies <joviangm at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thursday, 8 September 2016 11:38:31 UTC+1, Dirk Munk  wrote:
>>
>>> Unless I'm very much mistaken, ADA is a registered trade mark. An ADA
>>> compiler can only carry the name "ADA" if it is confirmed to comply with
>>> the latest test sets of sources every year(?). A 1983 ADA compiler
>>> surely has no right to carry the name "ADA" in this respect.
>>
>> From http://archive.adaic.com/pol-hist/policy/trademrk.txt
>>
>> "The Ada Joint Program Office has announced that the Federal registration
>> of Ada as a trademark will not be maintained after November 30, 1987."
>
> In addition, it's perfectly normal to describe the older Ada compilers
> as being either an Ada-83 compiler or an Ada-95 compiler.
>
> Simon.
>

I do have a good memory so it seems, because I remembered the trade mark 
thing. It has been replaced by the "Validated ADA" stamp, however there 
are (almost?) no recent validations.

Of course you're right that an ADA compiler can be made (and validated) 
for the 1983, 1995, 2005 and 2012 standard.

If there is going to be an ADA compiler on x86 VMS, then in my opinion 
it should be a validated ADA 2012 compiler. For those companies needing 
ADA, the combination of a highly reliable OS and an ADA 2012 compiler 
could be a very attractive offering.

I never used ADA, however the idea behind it always attracted me. If it 
would be used more often, we would see far less 'computer glitches' I'm 
sure.

I liked reading this in the ADA 2012 Rationale:

"Those whose first language was Algol 60 or Algol 68 or who have had the 
misfortune to dabble in horrid languages such as C will have been 
surprised that a language of the richness of Ada does not have 
conditional expressions. Well, the good news is that Ada 2012 has at 
last introduced conditional expressions which take two forms, if 
expressions and case expressions.

The reason that Ada did not originally have conditional expressions is 
probably that there was a strong desire to avoid any confusion between 
statements and expressions. We know that many errors in C arise because 
assignments can be used as expressions. But the real problem with C is 
that it also treats Booleans as integers, and confuses equality and 
assignment. It is this combination of fluid styles that causes problems. 
But just introducing conditional expressions does not of itself 
introduce difficulties if the syntax is clear and unambiguous."