ez2load helping Ada

[Chris.Morgan@BAESEMA.CO.UK]

Hello,

  I have been spending some time handing out copies of the EZ2LOAD package
assembled by Prof Mike Feldman and co. I just want to say that, now this
version includes tasking, it is really starting to attract serious attention.
Ironically this GNAT port runnning on perhaps the worst operating of all the
ones it is ported to, is one of the most important. Important that is for
helping the spread of Ada into grass-roots/home computing. It gives Ada a
chance to win the hearts and minds of the young people who will be building the
big systems in the 21st century.

  Ada now covers the full spectrum - you can learn one language and apply it
equally to small personal projects or huge safety-critical monster projects (or
even web applets :-). My experience was that it wasn't until I wrote my five
task Asteroids game for our embedded target that I really got a gut feel for
tasking, even though I had used it several times on more serious projects. Now
with GNAT and the EZ2LOAD package I can repeat this process for any aspect of
the language on an inexpensive machine at home ("I really want to brush up my
understanding of B+ trees...").

  Colleagues of mine are reevaluating their view of Ada from "that language
that we have to use big servers to compile and only runs on special targets" to
"that language that comes free and runs on DOS and does eveything I want to
without the gotchas of C". And once I have their interest via EZ2LOAD/GNAT they
are more inclined to take an interest in Ada95 generally, so they can be told
about all the great work that is being done by people like ACT, Thomson,
Intermetrics, Rational etc and in fact my next line of attack is "Well here's
the info on ActiveAda, here is the AppletMagic beta etc etc".

  So I would like to thank everyone responsible for EZ2LOAD, more power to
their elbow I say, and I would suggest everyone who reads this takes a moment
to check whether there isn't some easy Ada promotion they could do for the sake
of making up a few floppies and handing them round at work or wherever.

Greetings from London!

Chris Morgan

chris.morgan@baesema.co.uk