Re: Standard Ada Preprocessor

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"David Starner" <dvdeug@email.ro> wrote in message
news:pan.2004.01.27.18.56.15.347278@email.ro...
> On Tue, 27 Jan 2004 13:00:31 -0500, Warren W. Gay VE3WWG wrote:
> ... 15 years ago, someone made a killing by releasing a
> Turbo Pascal for under a hundred bucks, and made Pascal a major language.

About the same time, RRS offers Janus/Ada for $99. It certainly didn't make
Ada more popular... (And it should be remembered that Turbo Pascal was the
third such low priced Pascal. Anybody remember the $29 JRT Pascal that
preceded it? There's more to it than the price...)

> Free software has helped drop the off-the-shelf price of a complete Un*x
> system with C, C++, Pascal and Lisp compilers to under a hundred bucks.
> But I still get quoted a price of $700 for an Ada compiler.

For the record, you can buy Janus/Ada for as little as $195 (with only 90
days of support, and no GUI tools).

> Maybe that's
> fine for ye system engineers, but programmers, especially we student
> programmers, don't have a wealth of money to drop on compilers. Perhaps I
> need to find a new hammer.

Ada doesn't have the sort of sugar daddies that a lot of these other
languages to. So far as I know, all existing Ada compilers are produced by
companies that make substantial portions of their revenue from their Ada
development systems. Giving them away isn't going to improve the bottom
line.

For instance, here at RRS, virtually all of our revenue is from Ada
development tools. If we started to give them away for free, there would be
a number of effects: (1) Support costs would jump dramatically. With far
more users, there would be far more questions to answer and bugs to track
down. We'd have to implement a "triage" system - which is precisely what you
don't like about ACT. (2) Revenue would drop to zero - we have no other
products. We've never sold much support, probably because we answer
questions from anyone with one of our products, supported or not. (3)
Because of (1) and (2), we'd need to find another revenue source. What ever
that is, it would remove most of the resources from the Ada compiler. So the
net effect would be to completely stall development of the Ada compiler.
That's unlikely to help you or anyone else.

Your complaint really seems to boil down to not liking the policies of the
maintainer of GNAT. The obvious solution in the Open Source world is to find
another maintainer. All you have to do is figure how those people will be
funded (or convinced to do a full-time job for free).

                               Randy.