alt Hacker NewsThe US Air Force intended to use ADA, but had to use JOVIAL instead because ADA took so long to be developed. Most people have never heard of JOVIAL but it still exists in the USAF as a legacy.
I worked with JOVIAL as part of my first project as a programmer in 1981, even though we didn't even have a full JOVIAL compiler there yet (it existed elsewhere). I remember all the talk about the future being ADA but it was only an incomplete specification at the time.
JOVIAL had been in use within the US Air Force for more than a decade before the first initiative for designing a unique military programming language, which has resulted in Ada.
JOVIAL had been derived from IAL (December 1958), the predecessor of ALGOL 60. However JOVIAL was defined before the final version of ALGOL 60 (May 1960), so it did not incorporate a part of the changes that had occurred between IAL and ALGOL 60.
The timeline of Ada development has been marked by increasingly specific documents elaborated by anonymous employees of the Department of Defense, containing requirements that had to be satisfied by the competing programming language designs:
1975-04: the STRAWMAN requirements
1975-08: the WOODENMAN requirements
1976-01: the TINMAN requirements
1977-01: the IRONMAN requirements
1977-07: the IRONMAN requirements (revised)
1978-06: the STEELMAN requirements
1979-06: "Preliminary Ada Reference Manual" (after winning the competition)
Already the STRAWMAN requirements from 1975 contained some features taken from JOVIAL, which the US Air Force used and liked, so they wanted that the replacement language should continue to have them.
However, starting with the IRONMAN requirements, some features originally taken as such from JOVIAL have been replaced by greatly improved original features, e.g. the function parameters specified as in JOVIAL have been replaced by the requirement to specify the behavior of the parameters regardless of their implementation by the compiler, i.e. the programmer specifies behaviors like "in", "out" and "in/out" and the compiler chooses freely how to pass the parameters, e.g. by value or by reference, depending on which method is more efficient.
This is a huge improvement over how parameters are specified in languages like C or C++ and in all their descendants. The most important defects of C++, which have caused low performance for several decades and which are responsible for much of the current complexity of C++ have as their cause the inability of C++ to distinguish between "out" parameters and "in/out" parameters. This misfeature is the reason for the existence of a lot of unnecessary things in C++, like constructors as something different from normal functions, and which cannot signal errors otherwise than by exceptions, of copy constructors different from assignment, of the "move" semantics introduced in C++ 2011 to solve the performance problems that plagued C++ previously, etc.