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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

I always liked Ada, from my first reading around 1980 of MIL-STD-1815. Many of D's features were inspired by Ada.

If you have the time, I'd love to hear a bit about why you ended up creating D, rather than writing an Ada compiler? (Seeing how you wrote a c++ compiler...).

At the time, I had only written a couple toys. I thought writing an Ada compiler was impossible. It's also impossible to write a C++ compiler, but I didn't realize that and did it anyway (several years later, after I'd written a C compiler). I thought that C++ was just adding member functions and a few keywords to C.

Why didn't you, at least, put in Ada's numeric type system into D? You would've had a massive edge over C++ right there.

Probably because I didn't have the Ada spec anymore at the time.

But D did get _ embeddable in numeric literals, a very nice feature that D made popular and now it's normal in other languages.

Shame you didn't write an Ada compiler, the docs were available. It would've been interesting to see what you would've come up with. It'd still be interesting I think.

A lot of the older closed compiler are still based around the program library idea which is no longer required, considering GNAT is file / project based. I've only used GNAT and have no idea how the program library versions work.

I still have a copy of the original Ada MIL spec.

I think someone was looking for that. You don't have a copy of the other languages do you? Red is online, but blue and yellow are not.

I bought the original spec MIL-STD-1815 10-December-1980 back in 1980 or so, but it didn't survive a purge I made when moving. A couple years ago I went looking for it. It's not online anywhere, but I found an old library copy for sale and snapped it up. It's green, and I don't have any of the other specs.

I'm sad I also purged my DECSystem-10 "Orange Book". I've never been able to find a replacement anywhere.

Do you remember if the nickname was "Orange Book" or was it "phone book"? I didn't see the former when searching for more information, but the latter was referenced here [0].

If it's actually "phone book", then [1] seems promising.

[0] http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/pdp10stuff/

[1] http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp10/TOPS10/1972_PDP-10_Us...

It looks like the "Assembly Language Handbook" in the first reference. It was a very thick book, printed on very thin paper like a phone book. I clearly remember it as "Orange Book", after all, it is orange, but that just might have been Caltech vernacular. (Caltech had many local words unheard off campus.)

A marvelous find, thanks! I'm glad they haven't all vanished. I'd still like a scan pdf!

Hmm, you may be in luck. That one looks like it's in the parent directory of the second link: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp10/TOPS10/1973_Assembly_...

Sweet! Nice to see that manual again!

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