Re: "is ada dead?" A challenge for all of us?

["McDoobie" <chris@dont.spam.me>]

In article <mailman.994781951.32588.comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org>, Michael
Erdmann <michael.erdmann@snafu.de> wrote:

> "Robert C. Leif, Ph.D." schrieb:
> 
>> ..................
>> 1) Fax software. Symantec WinFax does not support Windows ME.
>> 2) Roxio (Adaptec) Direct CD has extremely limited functionality for
>> backups. A GUI version of DOS XCopy would be far more useful.
> 
> What ever you intend to do, the impportant question is how we are
> boundling such acitivities. Either you all could setup project pages e.g
> at sourceforge (if you comply to open source) or we setup one central
> place some where to support such an initiative.
> 
> I would be willing to support such an effort to some extend!
> 
> 
> Regards
>    M.,Erdmann
> 
> PS:
> 
> One thing which i find realy boring that there is no real state of the
> art IDE for the GNAT  available.  This is what i am interested in.
> 
> 

I tend to teeter more towards to Free Software side of things, ala LGPL. 
However, I'm certainly in favor of commercial projects that develop 
software which is actually of commercial quality.(Much of what passes
as a commercial app today falls far short of that goal.)

A state of the art IDE sounds like an awsome idea. It could be implemented
for the GNAT system initially. If it was Open Source, it wouldn't be too 
difficult to expand it to include other toolchains as well.

Another thing that might help would be to develope a sort of ultra-reliable
toolset, sort of like the Praxis Systems Sparks toolchain, only directed 
more towards servers and the desktop market, rather than the embedded 
and specialized systems that the Spark tools are geared towards.

I'm still an up and coming Ada developer myself, just started learning not
long ago, so I'm not sure how much help I would be. Coming from a 
primarily procedural background(C, Assembler, TI-BASIC.) But I have 
brushed up against the OOP paradigm.(Perl, Python, a little Java.)  
So it would seem that a project like this could really help my training.

Anyways.  Good idea. Lets bounce the idea around a little and see if it's 
workable. Like I said, not sure how much help I would be of yet...but it 
doesnt hurt to try.

Laters

McDoobie
chris@dont.spam.me