Re: ez2load helping Ada

[Simon Johnston <skj@ACM.ORG>]

Chris said

"  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."

Actually I think the really important version of GNAT will be the
WIndows/95 version, since after all these days even the cheapest
computer you can buy comes with Win95 preinstalled. So now what we
need is a really slick installation package for the Win95 version
using a standard Win95 Wizard, and then hopefully we can incorporate
some of the nice environment stuff from EZ2LOAD. (This is one of the
reasons I am personally switching to Ada 95).

The DOS version will of course continue to have some considerable use
on obsolete machines, which will take a while to die out, although
I think that will happen faster than people think. The other day I
bought a brand new NEC machine with a 486 and 8 megs of memory and
a 2X CD ROM and a 170 meg hard drive for under $400. That machine would
be quite fine for running student programs under Win95 using GNAT.

I have to agree with Robert here, although the DOS version is =
significant today I think that the Win32 version is where the future =
lies. It is very frustrating to see the Win32 version always a revision =
behind the other GNAT ports, though I know the team at LabTek are doing =
a great job, and although the installation is improving it would be nice =
to see the LabTek installation be a little more complete so as to be a =
one-stop Win32 Ada solution.

For instance include the Win32Ada bindings, the ADEPT Annex-E =
imlementation and so-on to produce a complete ready to go environment. =
You could even include on-line versions of the RM and have the MS style =
tick-box installation allow you to install as little or as much as you =
like. This may seem like a lot to some but this is a major market if we =
can find the right packaging and I would like to see the LabTek compiler =
really take off.

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