Robert C. Leif, Ph.D. wrote:
>
> From: Bob Leif
> To: Geoff Bull et al.
>
> Geoff Bull said it on his bottom line, "Personally, I think we should take
> Ada, call it something else, and claim we have just invented the next great
> thing." Your suggestion is commonly referred to as repackaging, which should
> amuse this audience. The new language (Ada'Next) should be XML_Script. We
> keep Ada semantics and only modify the syntax to match XML were necessary.
> Thus, we leverage off of XML and retain a one-to-one correspondence to Ada.
> This would permit the reuse of existing Ada 95 compilers. Fortunately, XML
> ends items with their name like Ada.
>
> The XML programmer would create XML_Script in strongly typed frames. It
> should NOT be text based. All familiar Ada blocks would be frames. For
> instance, the two most common outer (containing) frames would be package
> specifications and bodies. The frames as with Ada can be nested inside one
> another. Much of the language could be fill in the blanks. ASIS tools can be
> made to facilitate this type of programming. In short, we would have an
> excellent tool for programming macros for commercial products like
> word-processors and spreadsheets.

That would be _so_ funny if it worked. And I think it would. Someone
should do it.
If you can't beat 'em, trick 'em.
I know the suggestion has a serious undertone, but I'm just thinking of
the programmers' faces when they finally realize they've been using Ada
and how good it is.

Gary

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Gary Kephart, Software Engineer  |  Cinebase Software, Inc.
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Team Ada member                  |  "Digital Media Management System"

Disclaimer: these are my opinions, not Cinebase's.