Ada, ALE, ALICE, and MARC?

[utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!AFITGORDON at BBNB]

        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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