RE: An open plea to the W3C (was Re: XInclude vs SAX vs

["Fuchs, Matthew" <matthew.fuchs@commerceone.com>]

Without taking sides, this comment isn't relevant to Hoare's original
complaint, which applied to C just as well as Ada.  He wanted to prove
program reliability.

(However, as an aside on this topic, as an undergrad I had a classmate whose
summer job was writing test cases for the Ada validation suite.  She assured
me [incorrectly] that it would be at least 10 years before anyone had an
approved Ada compiler.  Of course, I later did grad work at NYU, where I got
to hobnob with the people who wrote that first compiler! ;-)

Matthew

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bullard, Claude L (Len) [mailto:clbullar@ingr.com]
> Sent: Monday, August 27, 2001 7:07 AM
> To: Steven R. Newcomb; simonstl@simonstl.com
> Cc: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: RE: An open plea to the W3C (was Re: XInclude vs SAX vs
> 
> 
> Yet by the mid 90s, optimizers for ADA had been shown 
> to create code that ran as fast and as reliably as C. 
> Just as with SGML and now XML++, sharp people carved 
> off the pieces they needed for their projects and 
> made them work locally.  What is different in our situation 
> is the size of the locale in which these things must 
> work.
> 
> Complexity is manageable given willing resources.  My 
> sense of the web is that anything very complex will 
> soon encounter and very unwilling set of resources, 
> so the first thing to accept is that nothing universal 
> is achievable for very long.
> 
> Len 
> http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard
> 
> Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
> Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Steven R. Newcomb [mailto:srn@coolheads.com]
> 
> 
> About ten years later, another Turing Award Lecturer (don't have time
> to track down the reference) complained about the complexity of Ada.
> According to what I recall from reading about it in _Computerworld_ 20
> years ago, the complaint was different from Dijkstra's complaint about
> PL/I (below).  The complaint was not so much that programmers couldn't
> handle Ada's complexity, but that reliably implementing Ada itself was
> simply out of reach.  The speaker worried that missile guidance
> systems and other weapon systems running real-time Ada programs would
> misbehave in various unforeseeable ways.  He was horrified that the
> U.S. military was trying to standardize on Ada.
> 
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