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 -------------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Kephart, Software Engineer | Cinebase Software, Inc. Phone: (310)914-2771 | 11835 West Olympic, Suite 1000 Fax: (310)479-8480 | Los Angeles, CA 90064 mailto:[log in to unmask] | http://www.cinebase.com Team Ada member | "Digital Media Management System" Disclaimer: these are my opinions, not Cinebase's.