Meridian's AdaZ compiler summary

Meridian's AdaZ compiler summary

[James Hartley]

I received a number of responses regarding Meridian's AdaZ compiler advertized
in the November 1990 issue of CACM.  I would like to sincerely thank the fol-
lowing for sending information to me:

	yow@sweetpea.jsc.nasa.gov 
	pattis@cs.washington.edu 
	mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu 
	ms33@prism.gatech.edu 
	rharwood@east.pima.edu

Many others requested that I summarize what I received, so here it goes...

AdaZ is a fully validated Ada compiler and is equivalent to Meridian's 
AdaVantage 4.1 real mode compiler.  AdaZ departs from older versions in that 
it uses a "BlackBeard"-like (Meridian describes it as "Turbo Pascal"ish) editor
instead of MicroEMACS which was used earlier.  In the spirit of the current 
integrated environment fad, the LRM is accessible via a hypertext format 
along with the debugger from within the environment.  The compiler itself does 
not utilize extended memory, nor does it produce code that takes advantage of 
it.  It was mentioned in one post that this limitation to the lower 640K 
caused problems with programs of the order of 3000 lines in version 2.2.
The code generated will run on 8086 or 80286 architectures, but the 80386 is 
not currently supported.  When I called Meridian about this, I was told that 
an upgrade will be coming out shortly.  5M of harddisk space is required for 
the product.

For those wishing to use some other editor, the compiler can be invoked via
the command line.

Several libraries are included with the package along with source code:  a 
generic math library (WG9 Numerics Rapporteur Group), a string handling library
as mentioned in the LRM, a graphics library, and a DOSenvironment library.

One post mentioned that a definitive review of PC Ada compilers can be found
in the 10 September 1990 issue of _PC Week_.

Another post mentioned that a number of bugs existed in AdaVantage version 4.0.
Most of these bugs were size related WRT large programs -- hard-coded symbol- 
and link-table sizes.  Using RENAME on an array was also found to fail after 
using the optimizer.  Pointers to unconstrained arrays traversed in a FOR-NEXT
loop has been found to fail.  Meridian has been responsive in fixing many bugs,
however, in version 4.1 (AdaZ).

Another post described AdaZ as enhancing Meridian's AdaStudent with the LRM 
online.  This respondent cautions that the integrated environment is not as 
smoothly spliced together when compared to Borland's "Turbo" or Microsoft's 
"Quick" environments.  AdaStudent, however, was "crippled" in that it was not
fully validated;  AdaZ is fully validated and allows preemptive scheduling,
time-slicing, etc.  Meridian is also giving legitimate owners of AdaStudent
a $50 credit towards purchasing AdaZ.

As is seen with other Ada compilers, AdaZ is not as fast at compilation as 
Microsoft C or Turbo C++;  yet for an inexpensive PC Ada compiler, all re-
spondents were positive about its value.

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-- 
James J. Hartley               _   /| Internet: jamesh@cs.umr.edu
Department of Computer Science \'o.O'   Bitnet: jamesh@cs.umr.edu@umrvmb.bitnet
University of Missouri - Rolla =(___)=    UUCP: ...!uunet!cs.umr.edu!jamesh
"Life is like an analogy..."      U    ACK!  PHFFT!