A farewell to Ada with null (1992)

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12 pointsummonk4 comments

Interesting letter! His concerns were legitimate regarding complexity, but most of the items in his list of features are indispensable. Basically Ada 83 was a pre-version lacking key features for practical use, although it had already cool features (exceptions, modularity, generics, tasks, ...).

What happenned next? I see Ada9X became Ada95 (this post was from 1993) and Jean D. Ichbiah went on to work on stylus computer interfaces. Did the standard see a substantial revision yet after this letter?

There were two more revisions (Ada 2005 and Ada 2012) with substantial additions, but I'd say the biggest jump was from Ada83 to Ada95.

Tucker Taft has been the lead architect for all post-83 versions of Ada, so there's some consistency in the direction of additions.

If Ada83 is analogous to C, Ada95 would be analogous to C++, with subsequent versions of Ada being analogous to subsequent versions of C++.

I'd personally argue that the situation we're in today, with one company (AdaCore) being responsible for the only open source Ada compiler out there, is due in large part to the large increase in complexity of the Ada language (the Ada83 reference manual was 348 pages while the Ada 2012 reference manual is 951 pages).

There is also an Ada 2022 standard.

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