(j3.2006) Ada committee (WG9) position on new requests

[Bill Long]

There seem to be a couple of differences between the Ada scheme an ours. 

1) Ada has the flood gates open at all times. (Or maybe not a flood, if few people care enough to submit requests?)  We have phased operation where we allow feature requests, settle on a set of new features, and then have an implementation and publication phase during which new features requests are disallowed. I think that avoiding the distraction of new feature requests during the implementation phase is an advantage. 

2) There is a potential difference between ?use case? (Fortran) and ?programming problem? (Ada).  The ?programming problem? description seems more open to abuse.  Does "programming problem? include the case someone who has a badly designed code and wants to be bailed out of a hard place by adding some wart to the language that allows him to avoid fixing the code?   Consider, for example, the recent email thread about misguided desires to redefine the CMPLX function so wrong programs could become conforming.   I?m more comfortable with the ?use case? terminology.  Time will tell if that confidence is misplaced. 

Cheers,
Bill


> On Jul 7, 2017, at 2:28 PM, Van Snyder <van.snyder at jpl.nasa.gov> wrote:
> 
> WG 9 welcomes suggestions for language enhancements at any time. These
> should be sent to ada-comment at ada-auth.org. For enhancement requests (as
> opposed to identification of errors in the Ada 2012 Standard), it is very
> important to describe the programming problem and why the Ada 2012 solution
> is complex, expensive, or impossible. A detailed description of a specific
> enhancement is welcome but not necessarily required. The goal of the ARG is
> to solve as many programming problems as possible with new/enhanced Ada
> features that fit into the existing Ada framework. Thus the ARG will be
> looking at the language as a whole, which may suggest alternative solutions
> to the problem.
> 
> A similar posture doesn't seem unreasonable for Fortran.
> 
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Bill Long                                                                       longb at cray.com
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