>Only in Ada do we care seriously about this, and I conjecture that the
>culture of caring about it derives from DoD caring so much about it in
>the 80s. Now that the culture is entrenched, it's (luckily) hard to
>shake it.

Hard to, but not impossible. I may be mistaken, but I seem to remember that even
the Ada vendors do not seem to submit their products for validation as much now
that it isn't mandatory.

>(2) At about the same time, I attended an Ada BoF at SIGCSE. One of
>the guys there was an Englishman who worked for BSI (their ANSI) and
>said he was responsible for the ISO Pascal validation suite. He said
>he respected the Ada community for their serious view of validation,
>and that Borland Pascal had failed his suite miserably. And nobody
>seemed to care.

In my experience of Pascal, I was aware that there was an ISO standard, but this
was woefully inadequate for any serious business use. The only way anyone could
possibly sell Pascal for business use rather than purely education was to
provide masses of extensions, which often had the effect of compromising
language features.

Although Ada does inherit some parts from Pascal, the original definition seemed
to pull in and standardise many of the extensions that were defined and used by
e.g. Borland (Turbo Pascal), Digital (VAX Pascal) and others, as well as tidying
up the language in general (e.g. removal of the distinction between array
elements and function parameters, and changing the TYPE, VAR and CONST sections.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that I don't believe Pascal to be a good
example of failure in the validation system due to the limited nature of the
language itself.

John



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