Would any other language meet the HOLWG requirements today?

General
1

According to Grady Booch software engineering with Ada book. The high order language working groups task was to

"Identity requirements for DoD high-order languages".

“Evaluate existing languages against these requirements.”

"Recommend the adoption or implementation of a minimal set of programming languages".

They couldn’t find an existing language to meet those requirements.

The question is would any other language than Ada do so today. I guess a subset of C++ though C was ruled out as a base for any acceptable language.

2

I have read someone on Facebook write « any language can be an abstraction of/over C »… (it can be a requirement if a language: building other languages…)… and I disagree ! A little S : String := Get_Line; can’t be expressed in C. Ada can allocate a variable length array in the stack, not C !

1 Like
3

It’s interesting that Java had more compliance than c++ atleast in 97.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200914235617/https://dwheeler.com/steelman/steeltab.htm

4

alloca()

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5

C supports variable-sized arrays since the C99 standard.

void fun(int size) 
{ 
     int arr[size]; 
     // Code 
}
6

Yep, those solved quite a few problems for me in C.

I think they made them optional to support in the standard at c11. At some point there was some talk about deprecating them but I don’t know if that ever happened officially

I liked VLAs, but I do understand why the C language community moved away from them since there isn’t any stack checking in C (Ada does this, so they aren’t as dangerous for Ada)