Lacking Natural Simplicity

Recent Reading

• Nebula Winners Twelve, ed. Gordon R. Dickson, copyright 1978 by Science Fiction Writers of America; Harper and Row, 1987.

  • A Crowd of Shadows, by Charles L. Grant. Nebula Winner.

  • Breath's a Ware That Will Not Keep, by Thomas F. Monteleone.

  • Tricentennial, by Joe Haldeman.

  • In the Bowl, by John Varley.

  • The Academic Viewpoint, by James Gunn.

  • The Bicentennial Man, by Isaac Asimov. Nebula Winner.

  • Houston, Houston, Do You Read?, by James Triptree, Jr. Nebula Winner.

  These are some of short Nebula winners and runners-up from 1976. A good collection; all the stories are still worth reading.

Ada and doing things right

I enjoy reading the newsgroup comp.lang.ada, because there are number of people there who are doing commercial work with very high quality requirements and interesting problems to solve. It's nice to listen to folks who really work to get things right. And sometimes it's just a relief to read code that's written with a clear syntax.

Speaking of Ada 200Y, Martin Dowie has back-port to Ada 95 of some of the new Ada 200Y packages:

• AI-248 - Ada.Directories.*

• AI-286 - Ada.Assertions

• AI-296 - Ada.Numerics.Generic_[Complex|Real]_Arrays

• AI-301 - Ada.(Wide_)Text_IO.(Wide_)Unbounded_IO

• AI-302 - Ada.Containers.*

• AI-346 - Ada.Numerics.Generic_[Complex|Real]_Arrays.Generic_Roots

• AI-351 - Ada.Calendar.*