Return to Fantasy

General
1

Hi everyone,

In the late 1970s, I heard stories about the colored statuettes and a new programming language.

For me, Ada became a professional fantasy, even without seeing a single line of code

But actually, I spent almost 50 happy years developing in ASM, Fortran, PLM/86, C, C++, C#, Go, and Zig.

Now, I want to return.

My last project, tofu is messaging for boring systems.

I would be very grateful if you could look at these three pages:

My questions:

  • Does the tofu approach make sense for Ada developers?
  • Does it contradict the way you already work?
  • If I port this, what would prevent you from using it?

Thank you for your time.

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2

What do you refer to?

3

AFAIR there were stories that the Ada proposals were presented during discussions as colored statuettes

4

I think it does make sense, though a lot of its ideas seem like they would be realized in Task and DSA — see this — and ruminate on it a bit: a real rewrite involves leveraging the special features of the new language, rather than just mere transliteration.

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5

That’s the reason I avoided discussing the API and showed devs dialog instead

6

Maybe this is what you meant?

Refining the requirements phases:

  • Straw Man - 1975

  • Wooden Man - 1975

  • Tin Man - 1976

  • Iron Man - 1976 : 17 proposals, 4 selected : «Green», «Red», «Blue», «Yellow»

  • Steel Man - 1978 : «Green» [Cii-Honeywell Bull], «Red» [Intermetrix].

  • Pebble Man - 1978/1979

1979-05-02 : «Green» won the competition

1980 July: Definitive version proposed to ANSI
1980 December 10 — MIL-STD-1815. (Cf. Lady Ada birthday 1815-12-10)
1983 April — Awarded ANSI standard — Ada 83
1987 June — ISO Standard 8652

Jean Ichbiah (Designer of the «Green Proposal» = Ada language)

2 Likes
7

YES

Thanks a lot!!!

8

Color coded proposals (green, red, blue, yellow), not statuettes…

9

Got it.

Didn’t realize it was folklore.

A bit sad — they were beautiful stories.

10

You might be confusing the color coded language proposals, of which “green” became Ada, with the statuettes of Lady Ada Lovelace that ACM SIGAda handed out for their annual awards, see ACM SIGAda Awards …

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11

I had not heard of Pebble Man before.

12

Pebbleman was the first document about creating a software environment for Ada. Stoneman followed, but the program was dropped.
Initial Thoughts on the Pebbleman Process
David Fisher

See page 4 box 20 at the page end.
Also see
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/An-object-based-virtual-operating-system-for-the-Taft/d14bc2f0209e892787fab1c405a727f6e6f3f03b

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13

The above is slightly confusing, because there were 2 different sequences of requirements documents: one for the language (Strawman, Woodenman, Tinman, Ironman, Steelman) and another for a development environment (Sandman, Pebbleman, Stoneman), between 1975 and 1980.

For extensive information on the Ada design process, see “Ada - The Project, The DoD High Order Language Working Group” by William A. Whitaker at [1], originally published in ACM SIGPLAN Notices (Vol. 28, No. 3, March 1993).

[1] Ada - DoD HOLWG, Col Wm Whitaker, 1993

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