Editor's Note: Jean Ichbiah, the chief designer of the Ada language and the founder of Aonix progenitor Alsys, died January 26, 2007 of complications from a brain tumor. In tribute to Jean, we asked former Aonix vice president Jacques Brygier to provide his remembrances from having worked with Jean at Alsys. Currently, Jacques Brygier is Vice President of Product Strategy with Aonix partner SYSGO, a noted supplier of real-time operating systems.

The Content and the Container

I met Jean Ichbiah the first time in 1986 but I had heard of him several years before when I was a student in the Computer Science department of the University of Lille. Ada was already famous and taught in the early 80’s and I was one of the numerous programmers who learned how to do "right" coding by using what was at this time the best-of-breed technology.

I then had the opportunity to know Jean better as he hired me in his company, Alsys. Something I realized quite soon was that Jean was applying to all his activities in life the same principles that made the language he designed the winner of the international contest that the DoD initiated in the late 70’s. To summarize I would say that for Jean the container is almost as important as the content. Let me explain. The language he designed with his team (and which eventually became the Ada language we know) was rigorously defined to the point that every statement was justified, made consistent with all the others, and matching as closely as possible to the big set of requirements issued by the DoD. But Jean had his own very strict requirements of having not only the description right but the way the description document was created (font, paragraph style, text structure, etc.) right. His permanent quest for having the details right led him to these great achievements that were the definition a still widely used language, or the creation of a company that still thrives after so many years, Aonix.

I don’t know if Jean (or his relatives) would recognize himself in this definition but for me it contributed to one lesson of life: things must not only to relate to rightness (content) but also to beauty (container)….

with Ada.Text_IO; use Ada.Text_IO;
procedure Goodbye_World is
begin
       Put ("Goodbye world!");
end Goodbye_World;

Goodbye Jean.

Jacques can be reached at jacques.brygier@sysgo.com.