wtwolfe@hubcap.clemson.edu (Bill Wolfe) (03/17/90)
From comp.std.internat article <9310@shlump.nac.dec.com>, by lasko@regent.dec.com (Tim Lasko, Digital Equipment Corp., Westford MA): > > In re the discussion on 5- vs. 10-year cycles, the ISO-IEC rule is "5": From > the ISO-IEC Directives Part 1, Procedures for the technical work, clause > 2.7.1: > % "Every International Standard shall be reviewed at least every five years % by the technical committee or sub-committee responsible for it, in order to % decide by a majority vote of the P-members voting whether it should be % confirmed, revised, or withdrawn." I had heard at the Ada 9X discussion at the Eighth Annual National Conference on Ada Technology that the next revision would take place in TEN years due to 10 years being the standard ISO revision cycle... are there any knowledgeable people who could comment? (If a five-year cycle is indeed in accordance with the internationally accepted and agreed-upon norm, I strongly believe that Ada should be on a five-year revision cycle and *NOT* a ten-year revision cycle..) Bill Wolfe, wtwolfe@hubcap.clemson.edu
eachus@aries.mitre.org (Robert I. Eachus) (03/18/90)
In article <8412@hubcap.clemson.edu> wtwolfe@hubcap.clemson.edu (Bill Wolfe) writes: > I had heard at the Ada 9X discussion at the Eighth Annual National > Conference on Ada Technology that the next revision would take place > in TEN years due to 10 years being the standard ISO revision cycle... > are there any knowledgeable people who could comment? > (If a five-year cycle is indeed in accordance with the internationally > accepted and agreed-upon norm, I strongly believe that Ada should be > on a five-year revision cycle and *NOT* a ten-year revision cycle..) > Bill Wolfe, wtwolfe@hubcap.clemson.edu The rule in both the ANSI and ISO communities is that a decision to affirm, revise, or abandon has to be made five years after a standard is adopted, and that a standard which has been neither affirmed or superceded within ten years lapses. In 1988 (five years after the 1983 Ada ANSI standardization) the Ada Board recommended that a new standard be developed. This Ada 9X process recommendation was very close to what has developed and was about 30 pages in final form...quite a detailed recommendation. The ISO Ada standard was adopted in 1987 (a pointer to the ANSI and French standards), so it is not due for review unitl 1992, and will not lapse until 1997. Since the ISO standard technically supercedes the ANSI standard in this country, the real lapse date is 1997, but I hope we have at least a proposed new ANSI standard before 1993, and an adopted standard well before 1997. In fact we could be starting on the next revsion by then. (Sigh...) My current guess (not my preferences, just a guess as to what will happen) is that the first revision will be a very minor one, with the largest changes being things like replacing ASCII with Latin-1, allowing literals from other character sets, unsigned types (but not as predefined integer types), dynamic prioities, and better support for entry families. The following revison can deal with evolution. There may be some extensions to make OOP easier, but don't expect much in the way of changes. Just the ability to do what you can do already in a much more elegant way. (Which is a lot. The only major feature not directly supported in Ada is multiple inheritance, and overload resolution makes that a big can of worms.) -- Robert I. Eachus with STANDARD_DISCLAIMER; use STANDARD_DISCLAIMER; function MESSAGE (TEXT: in CLEVER_IDEAS) return BETTER_IDEAS is...
blakemor@software.org (Alex Blakemore) (03/19/90)
In article <EACHUS.90Mar17181052@aries.aries.mitre.org> eachus@aries.mitre.org (Robert I. Eachus) writes: > There may be some [Ada] extensions to make OOP easier, but don't expect > much in the way of changes. Just the ability to do what you can do > already in a much more elegant way. (Which is a lot.... > The only major [OOP] feature not directly supported in Ada is multiple inheritance, Are you serious? What about single inheritance? The inheritance provided by derived types is close to *useless* since you cant add fields/attributes to the new type. They provide strong typing and a way to change representations. Not to mention polymorphism (different than overloading) and dynamic binding. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Alex Blakemore blakemore@software.org (703) 742-7125 Software Productivity Consortium 2214 Rock Hill Road Herndon, VA 22070 ------------------------ Eschew Obfuscation !!! -----------------------