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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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