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

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

Steve sez:

"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. "

Ada was implemented reliably and optimized. 

Can we prove XML reliability?

The more I see new terms such as "ulabel" and oddities 
such as "t*pe* to explain what markup is about given 
that the problem is actually no one quite knows what 
namespaces are about, I have to wonder.  Obscurity is 
hard to hide.

Again, just as with SGML, just as with ADA, sharp 
people will carve off the pieces they need and 
work with them.  Global intereoperability will 
continue to be supported not by consortium lead 
specifications, but by the very large installed 
base of commercial applications.

Len 
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard

Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h


-----Original Message-----
From: Fuchs, Matthew [mailto: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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