Read all about it!
This message is extracted from the Ada-Belgium members mailing list. As the approval of the revised Ada standard is an important event for developers of large, complex systems, this message is reposted here for your information.Ada9X is in the final stages of approval: the final camera ready text of the standard was delivered to the ISO Central Secretariat in Switzerland on Wednesday November 30th, 1994, and accepted by the Secretariat and their publications division.
-- dc
Organizations developing software have problems and needs. Ada is an answer. The revised standard was developed in response to needs expressed by the using community. The completion of the revision is the final stage of a process that began with user input and requirements analysis and continuously solicited user input all along the way. The revised Ada standard will help do a better job.
The following message from Bob Mathis (head of the ISO Working Group on Ada) gives a clear overview of the situation. Feel free to forward it.
Anyone interested to take up Bob's suggestion and organise a celebration party on December 10th, the birthday of Augusta Ada Lovelace? ;-)
Dirk Craeynest
(Ada-Belgium Newsletter Editor & Team Ada)
Dirk.Craeynest@cs.kuleuven.ac.be
Forwarded message:
Date: Sat, 03 Dec 1994 13:06:40 -0500 (EST)
From: mathis@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu
Subject: ISO/IEC 8652:1995, Press Releases, Celebrate Dec. 10
To: iso@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu, team-ada@ACM.ORG, ialc@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu,
sigada-elected@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu, ada-aware@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu,
dgf@inel.gov, dweller@starbase.neosoft.com,
davemc@shindo.esd.sgi.com, karl@grebyn.com,
mcgaritj@cc.ims.disa.mil, carlsons@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu,
mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu, anderson@plk.af.mil,
halhart@bigsur.sdd.trw.com
Cc: pukite@daina.com, jgg@unix.brighton.ac.uk, cbradley@abssw.markv.com,
gerhardt@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu, jkohli@irvine.com, dyer@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu,
riehler@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu, tyler@netcom.com,
Sunil_Chawla@citynet.org, manoj.iitsoft@axcess.net.in,
reifer@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu, mathis@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu
This message summarizes some of the work that has been done and
remains to be done in finalizing the approval of Ada9X (ISO/IEC
8652:1995) and replies to the discussion about press releases
that has taken place on some mailing lists in the last few days.
(I edited the address lists a little in hopes of eliminating some
duplication. I hope this goes to everybody interested. Please
feel free to pass it along.)
There is a protocol about press releases concerning the approval of ISO/IEC standards. They are issued by ISO Central Secretariat to announce the availability of the standard to the international community. They are then reissued by national member bodies as they feel appropriate to announce the national availability of the standard.
Although the JTC1 ballot closed with unanimous approval, the standard was still not finished. In the case of Ada we were much closer to completion than is normal, but we still have some final stages.
We had worked to coordinate national comments with notification to the working group so that we in fact held the WG9 meeting resolving ballot issues after the ballot closed but before we received official notification from ISO Central Secretariat through the SC22 Secretariat. (The administrative hierarchy was very cooperative and gave us informal notification, but the official paper work takes time.)
WG9 must still issue the minutes of the Baltimore meeting and its official Disposition of Comments report through SC22 and JTC1. These have been finished and will be submitted next week. I do not think there will be any problems, but there are still official steps that must be taken.
The final camera ready text of the standard must be delivered and accepted by ISO Central Secretariat and their publications division. That was accomplished last Wednesday and Thursday as reported in my other message. (The publication staff was very flexible. In a five hundred page document there will almost certainly be a stylistic error that could be found that would require correction and thereby delay publication. They were not interested in looking for that. The work of Tucker Taft and Bob Duff was so good that ISO Central Secretariat said go ahead.)
There are approximately 100 other standards working toward publication yet this year and the large size of the Ada standard made it difficult to fit in. The date on ISO/IEC standards is the actual date of publication, not the date of approval. ISO wants to get the standard out and so do we. The logistics just say make it 1995.
No one should ever say we missed our deadline or our goal. Everyone knows of a software project that sacrificed quality for some artificial time schedule and turned out worthless because of it. WG9 (and the whole Ada community) is justifiably proud of the quality of its work and that it was completed in record time.
The draft of the revision was just registered as a Committee Draft in October, 1993. The SC22 ballot began immediately thereafter; the JTC1 ballot followed as soon as possible; and the work was all completed in December, 1995 -- fifteen months. Under the current rules and procedures this must be a record fast time. (Keith Brannon said they don't keep records of how fast because its not really a competition, but he agreed it was unusually fast. The ISO milestone plan had the revised standard scheduled for submission for publication about October 1995 and normal editorial work would have probably carried it into 1996. ISO Central Secretariat is very pleased that things were accomplished so quickly. It shows that the system can be made to work quickly when everybody cooperates.)
ISO Central Secretariat does not consider the standard finished until it is actually published. There are many potentials for problems at each stage of the process. They don't want to advertise "vaporware" standards. If they say a standard exists that means they actually have a copy to send you in response to an order.
Keith Brannon and I discussed the issuance of press releases and have already begun working on them. I wanted them to get out in advance of the actual publication of the standard so that the press could plan ahead. Many computer publications have lead times of weeks or even months.
ISO Central Secretariat will "issue" an official press release and I will try to make it available to people as soon as possible for wide distribution and coordination.
What about press releases from other organizations.
This revision has also been approved to become an American National Standard. We should have a press release about that. (Chris Anderson and I still have to coordinate the completion of that standard, but we knew we had to finalize the ISO one first.)
DoD will probably not make it into a MIL-STD, but will use it as an ISO standard in keeping with the Perry memo. DoD should probably issue press releases saying so.
It might also be important to note that DoD now as an approved standard incorporating features for object-oriented programming and interfacing to programs written in other languages. Transitioning legacy systems to distributed, object-oriented environments is a hot topic and a problem DoD has as much as any one else. Ada is a powerful tool to help in this area. There are many other good features of the revised language that might be pointed out from a DoD (or commercial systems) perspective.
Organizations developing software have problems and needs. Ada is an answer. The news is that there is a better answer, not that there is a revised standard that is going to be forced on projects.
The Ada Resource Association will certainly be emphasizing that Ada is the answer to many software development needs. The revised standard was developed in response to needs expressed by the using community. The completion of the revision is the final stage of a process that began with user input and requirements analysis and continuously solicited user input all along the way.
Every compiler vendor, tool vendor, training organization, consultant, text book author, work station vendor, systems integrator, project leader, and programmer should be telling people that the revised Ada standard will help do a better job. Each of these will have a different story to tell. They have different customer bases and different ways of getting their story out.
No one press release can do it for everybody. If anybody wants help, please contact me individually and directly. The ARA wants to help everybody get publicity for their work with Ada. I also have confidence in each of you to get the word out. That's what sales and marketing is all about. Tell people you can do a better job solving their problems because of Ada. The ultimate customers of our products and services want solutions not lots of talk about ISO standardization procedures.
I imagine that Boards of Elections issue press releases about the final results of voting three or four weeks after the election when there has been time to count all the absentee ballots and reconfirm all the tallies. I can only assume they issue such press releases because I have never noticed the press paying much attention to them. What the press covers are the celebration parties on election night. Then they talked to people about what this means.
We should take a similar approach. Tell people what the approval of the revision means to you, your business, your customers. Don't wait for the final, official press release. Tell people now.
Earlier this year the ARA came up with a poster showing "Just another dull, stodgy, non-creative developer who uses Ada." The picture is of somebody surfing. I had nothing to do with the selection, but I love the image. Chaos is all around us and a wave is one of the classic examples of chaotic behavior. Surfing is a way of managing on top of chaos, so is Ada. Twelve years ago I was in a situation that reminded me of swimming in rough surf. It was fun but a lot of work. That's the way a lot of projects are. Sometimes you think, isn't there a better way to work and enjoy this situation, can't I somehow get on top of things, how can I have it push me forward rather than pushing against me? With waves and water and surf, the answer is surfing. With complex software projects, the answer is Ada. Don't let my interpretation of this image ruin it for you. Get a copy of the poster for yourself by sending me a request. Really you could/ should request one for somebody else. Put it up in a place that will prompt people to talk with you about Ada.
Maybe you should have a celebration party. December 10 is Ada's birthday (you remember Augusta Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, born on December 10, 1815; just before Lord Byron went to Switzerland and suggested to Mary Shelly that she write a horror story that is again in the movie theaters). I am surprised when I learn that people don't know this. The AdaIC has a short description about the historical Ada you can retrieve off the AJPO machine. It is a great day for a party (falling on Saturday this year). If your company is having some kind of holiday party this year, remind people there are more than just religious reasons to celebrate. A lot of companies (and people) use this time of year to reflect on the past and look forward to the future. The approval of the revised Ada is an important event for developers of large, complex systems and worthy of celebration.
If we're ever going to have a national (or international) programmers' holiday, it should be December 10. Maybe some computer people are geeks and don't know how to party, but I have never found this to be the case with Ada people.
The press likes a newsworthy event. Publication of a dry document in Switzerland is not nearly as interesting as the announcement of a new product or approach by a local company. If people really want to publicize the approval of the new Ada, let's celebrate next Friday and Saturday. You don't have to coordinate with anybody nationally. Get your own local press and public relations people involved. Go out to lunch on Friday and propose a toast. If you can't get it together by this weekend; be a late adopter, celebrate the week after that.
Get the word out that December 10, Ada's birthday, is a day for programmers and other computing people to celebrate. Take some segment of this message (or make up some words of your own) and post it the other mailing lists you read. Let's let everybody on the Internet know that the Ada revision has been approved.
(By the way, Common Lisp has been approved as an ANSI standard and Prolog has been approved (with comments) as an International Standard, but let them get their own news out. There are lots of things to celebrate in the programming languages area. C++ is finally circulating for review in the stage prior to Registration as a Committee Draft, so there is also lots of work to do.)
At Christmas time there is always a lot of discussion about Santa Claus. Well I believe in Santa Claus (but not quite the same way that Tim Allen does) and so do a lot of other people. But they don't sit back and wait for Santa to do it all by himself, they go out and buy presents and give them to people and don't care whether they or Santa gets the credit. Lots of non-Christians give presents at this time of year, too. We don't all have to have the same beliefs or traditions to realize that we can accomplish goods things by each doing a little part individually.
I believe in Ada, but the only way it is going to work is if everybody goes out and does their part. Don't wait on the AJPO, or ISO, or SIGAda, or even the ARA to do it for you. The new revision of Ada is important for a lot of reasons. Your reasons are yours; you can always refer questions you can't answer to the ARA, AJPO, AdaIC, or other groups that you think might have the answer; you don't have to coordinate everything. Tell your friends and colleges. Let the press know. Celebrate.
-- Bob Mathis
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Last update: 95/03/28.
Dirk Craeynest