Aucbvax.1901
fa.unix-cpm
utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!AFITGORDON@BBNB
Wed Jun 24 03:54:04 1981
Ada, ALE, ALICE, and MARC?
Re the message of 23 June about the Computerworld article on
BBN's UNIX and C, WOW! Deja vu! I have been recently (for over a
year now) involved in DoD's Ada effort, and I have just finished
reviewing some contractor proposals to Rome Air Dev Center concerning
the creation of an ALE (Ada Language Environment) or ALICE (Ada
Language Integrated Computer Environment). The Computerworld article
almost reads like the summary of the contractors' proposals, with the
difference that you substitute Ada for C and ALICE or ALE for UNIX.
The ALE/ALICE concept is NOT to provide a new OS to the user
under which to develop his Ada programs, but rather to provide an
operating environment which will run on a large variety of OS's (over
70 major firms, including IBM, Goodyear Aerospace, Ford Aerospace,
etc, participated in the recent ALE conferences). There seems to be
an analogy here between Tymshare's AUGMENT and ALICE; both provide a
common set of tools (compilers [ALICE only], debuggers [ALICE only],
editors, file utilities, etc). The Ada rationale is based on the
concept of providing a common language to replace (future projects
only) the hundreds of languages currently in use thru DoD, while ALICE
extends this to include a common set of tools. This allows us to
educate Ada programmers in Ada the language and ALICE the tool set,
and the Ada programmer becomes a very flexible asset which can be
transported national-wide and be brought up on geographically
different systems with different OS's and not have to learn the OS-
particular attributes of the systems. Granted, Ada was originally
intended to meet the needs of the embedded computer world, but it is
so general, extensible (re packages and the "extended" features of the
language such as generic instantiation), and flexible that it may
generally be applied across the board (my opinion) to meet a wider
variety of needs, including those currently met by C. Also, like the
UCSD Pascal microengine, projects are underway (re CMU) to create "Ada
machines" which are directly implemented to support Ada at the
microcomputer level.
MARC seems to be parallel to ALICE in concept. I feel that
MARC may be a good direction in which to go since it provides an
environment which implements the valued UNIX Shell command structure,
supports C (as does CP/M), and still provides the necessary hooks to
run CP/M. Going in the direction of UNIX burns the CP/M bridges,
going in the direction of CP/M places a toll on the UNIX bridges, but
going in the direction of MARC opens all the bridges.
Rick
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