Re: PG: Hackers and Painters

[Laurent GUERBY <address@hidden>]

On Tue, 2003-05-20 at 13:23, Steve Dekorte wrote:
> I was thinking of Ruby, Python, Perl and Lisp as examples of 
> individually designed languages and languages like COBOL and ADA as 
> ones designed by committee. People seem to be less likely to program in 
> the later for fun.

The Ada standard was not "designed by a committee" as C++ or Common Lisp
were, for both the original definition (1983) and the latest revision
(1995) there was a team leader with absolute decision power.

Even if "big" by some standard, the language is quite coherent,
something that's hard to achieve with a committee.

For those interested in "small" language, there's SPARK which
is a subset of Ada with formal annotations to be checked
by a theorem prover, see <http://www.sparkada.com/book.html>.

Also, for those interested in language design, the whole Ada process is
completely open, all comments, design requirements, documents, standard,
annotations and updates are available for free on the web,
<http://www.adaic.org/standards/ada95.html> is a good starting point.

Laurent