Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!gatech!hubcap!billwolf From: billwolf@hubcap.clemson.edu (William Thomas Wolfe,2847,) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Good Design Strategies Message-ID: <4622@hubcap.UUCP> Date: 1 Mar 89 22:25:27 GMT References: <231@my6.sm.luth.se> Sender: news@hubcap.UUCP Reply-To: billwolf@hubcap.clemson.edu Lines: 42 [Due to the Followup-To, this article didn't make it to comp.lang.ada, although it obviously should have... Bill] From: rsimonian@x102c.harris-atd.com (Simonian RP 66449) >> >> Software Productivity Solutions, Inc., has announced a new product, >> Classic-Ada (tm), which allows Ada software developers to use >> inheritance and dynamic binding in object-oriented Ada designs. > >You mean that they sell a *super-set* of ADA? > >Mild sarcasm on: >This must be what we all have been waiting for ! >Mild sarcasm off. > >ADA is too much of an elephant already. I totally agree that >inheritance is good but ADA would have to be pruned a lot >before something new should be added to it. Classic-Ada is *NOT* a super-set of Ada. Harris has also developed a tool, called InnovAda, for true object-oriented programming in Ada (multiple-inheritance, dynamic binding, run-time message evaluation, and so on). Such tools generate compilable Ada code; if you wanted to, you could have created the same code generated by the tool. InnovAda and similar tools are preprocessors which enhance productivity by giving the designer/programmer a powerful development and maintenance environment. There are graphic design tools on the market which do some amount of code generation; would you consider those to be supersets of Ada? InnovAda and other object-oriented preprocessors still provide one with all the nice features of Ada, plus they supplement the language with the advantages of true object-oriented design. I have found these capabilities to be indispensable for several problem domains; particularly when one tries to implement Artificial Intelligence in Ada. Richard P. Simonian 407/984-6006 Natural Language Processing Group Harris GISD, Melbourne, FL 32902 Internet: rsimonian@x102c@trantor.harris-atd.com