Re: Required Metrics (GNAT et al)

["Ken Garlington" <Ken.Garlington@computer.org>]

<swhalen@netcom.com> wrote in message
news:8eksr5$kf8$1@slb1.atl.mindspring.net...
> I'm not sure it would be practical to include, say, the VxWorks
> metrics with the WinNT compiler, because there would be too many
> references to VxWorks that would be easy to explain in the context of
> the VxWorks documentation, but would make no sense in the WinNT docs.
>
> Metrics should be reproducible, but they would be reproducible only on
> the platform that was validated.
>
> The metrics would have to be very hardware / OS / compiler
> dependent.

Well, I don't think there's any requirement to provide the _entire_
documentation suite, just the _metrics_ (formula, whatever) from the
platform of choice. Using GNAT as an example, the documentation already
defines some features that really only make sense on specific platforms
(e.g. certain DEC Ada "emulations"), so there's certainly some precedent
here. The standard already appears to recognize that the metrics depend upon
context, so that shouldn't be an issue.

> The more I think about this, the more I'm convinced it would be wrong
> for a vendor to ship metrics with anything other than a validated
> compiler.

OK - does ACT do this? I wasn't aware you got different documentation for
the supported version versus the public version.