Interestingly Co-Pilot gets it wrong and states Ada was designed by committees instead of being multiple competitive processes. How misunderstood Ada is.
The High Order Language Working Group came up with the requirements.
kevlar700 · 5h ago
True but it was far more open than a committee. The STRAWMAN requirements were circulated widely for comment to industry, military, federal and academic communities and to select experts such as Dijkstra and Hoare. Then WOODENMAN circulated for comment after incorporating changes based on STRAWMANS responses.
adrian_b · 37m ago
I wish I knew who were the anonymous authors of DoD "IRONMAN" (January 1977), especially who has written the paragraph "7.2.F. (7F.) FORMAL PARAMETER CLASSES".
"IRONMAN" has introduced a very important innovation in programming languages, which has been inherited by Ada and by its derivatives, e.g. VHDL (the innovation is that formal parameters may have 3 kinds of behaviors, "in", "out" and "in out", and that the parameter behavior must be specified, but not its implementation mechanism, like in older programming languages).
Unfortunately this innovation has remained largely unknown for the authors of most more recent programming languages, which are defective because of that.
If Bjarne Stroustrup had bothered to read carefully the Ada specification before conceiving "C with Classes", he might have understood the implication of the "IRONMAN" parameter classes for languages with constructors and destructors, like C++, which could have avoided many decades of pain for the C++ users. In a language with the "IRONMAN" parameter classes, constructors can be ordinary functions and there is no need for many features that complicate C++, like distinct copy constructors and assignment operators, or "move" semantics. Moreover, the performance problems that have plagued C++ before 2011, due to the creation of unnecessary temporaries, would have been avoided since the beginning.
It is likely that the authors of "IRONMAN" did not fully understand the consequences of their innovation, but they had proposed it only in order to make the new DoD language more similar to Jovial, which was a programming language used in several DoD projects at that time. Jovial had such formal parameter classes, but their meaning was slightly different than in "IRONMAN" and in the later Ada, enough to make them much less useful.
Before "IRONMAN", the earlier DoD requirements were to be able to specify whether the parameters are passed by value or by reference, which is an extremely wrong requirement. It is the same mistake made by C and by its derivatives, including recent derivatives, like Rust.
How the parameters are passed must be decided by the compiler, not by the programmer. For the programmer it does not matter whether a parameter is passed by value or by reference, when the passing of the parameters is implemented correctly (e.g. an in-out parameter that is passed by value is copied from the caller to the function and then back when the function returns, if that is necessary; frequently this is not necessary, e.g. if the parameter is located in a register; if the in-out parameter is so big that copying would be slow, the compiler decides to pass it by reference; in C and its derivatives, both out and in-out parameters must be passed by reference, even when that is the wrong choice; moreover, the compiler cannot flag as an error the reading of an out parameter prior to its first writing).
"We did not have enough time to do a thorough analysis. The languages
arrived at WHMI on February 21 and were on my desk on February 22.
To insure the analysis is on your desk by March 13, we have to mail our
report on March 8. That gives us fourteen days (counting weekends) to
read the languages and work on the analysis. Figure two days to read and
understand a language. We have used eight days. Another three days are
used to write a report and solicit comments, and one day is lost typing.
That leaves two days to analyze the four languages. Even if we had a
thousand computer scientists doing the analysis, we could have only
scratched the surface of these designs. Two hundred and seventy women
can not have a baby in a day."
askvictor · 8h ago
How funny, I was just talking about and researching Ada at work this afternoon, while discussing what the best language for safety critical embedded systems would be
https://copilot.microsoft.com/shares/Jp9AmNHMEJzNmcbiu1VNx
https://copilot.microsoft.com/shares/vUjdaDh4mXvj1fm4cyt15
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Order_Language_Working_...
The High Order Language Working Group came up with the requirements.
"IRONMAN" has introduced a very important innovation in programming languages, which has been inherited by Ada and by its derivatives, e.g. VHDL (the innovation is that formal parameters may have 3 kinds of behaviors, "in", "out" and "in out", and that the parameter behavior must be specified, but not its implementation mechanism, like in older programming languages).
Unfortunately this innovation has remained largely unknown for the authors of most more recent programming languages, which are defective because of that.
If Bjarne Stroustrup had bothered to read carefully the Ada specification before conceiving "C with Classes", he might have understood the implication of the "IRONMAN" parameter classes for languages with constructors and destructors, like C++, which could have avoided many decades of pain for the C++ users. In a language with the "IRONMAN" parameter classes, constructors can be ordinary functions and there is no need for many features that complicate C++, like distinct copy constructors and assignment operators, or "move" semantics. Moreover, the performance problems that have plagued C++ before 2011, due to the creation of unnecessary temporaries, would have been avoided since the beginning.
It is likely that the authors of "IRONMAN" did not fully understand the consequences of their innovation, but they had proposed it only in order to make the new DoD language more similar to Jovial, which was a programming language used in several DoD projects at that time. Jovial had such formal parameter classes, but their meaning was slightly different than in "IRONMAN" and in the later Ada, enough to make them much less useful.
Before "IRONMAN", the earlier DoD requirements were to be able to specify whether the parameters are passed by value or by reference, which is an extremely wrong requirement. It is the same mistake made by C and by its derivatives, including recent derivatives, like Rust.
How the parameters are passed must be decided by the compiler, not by the programmer. For the programmer it does not matter whether a parameter is passed by value or by reference, when the passing of the parameters is implemented correctly (e.g. an in-out parameter that is passed by value is copied from the caller to the function and then back when the function returns, if that is necessary; frequently this is not necessary, e.g. if the parameter is located in a register; if the in-out parameter is so big that copying would be slow, the compiler decides to pass it by reference; in C and its derivatives, both out and in-out parameters must be passed by reference, even when that is the wrong choice; moreover, the compiler cannot flag as an error the reading of an out parameter prior to its first writing).
"We did not have enough time to do a thorough analysis. The languages arrived at WHMI on February 21 and were on my desk on February 22. To insure the analysis is on your desk by March 13, we have to mail our report on March 8. That gives us fourteen days (counting weekends) to read the languages and work on the analysis. Figure two days to read and understand a language. We have used eight days. Another three days are used to write a report and solicit comments, and one day is lost typing. That leaves two days to analyze the four languages. Even if we had a thousand computer scientists doing the analysis, we could have only scratched the surface of these designs. Two hundred and seventy women can not have a baby in a day."