Re: ada compiler w/ edu discount

Re: ada compiler w/ edu discount

[AM Barry]

In article <2061@itexjct.jct.ac.il> avraham@itexjct.jct.ac.il (avraham shir-el)
 writes:
>
>we've been running Verdix ADA on our sun3/60 and sparcII for a while.
>when purchased, verdix gave big discounts to universities.
>from what i understand, now, all verdix ada sales for sun/4's r handled by
>sun themselves and there r very small, if any university discounts.
>about a year ago , we paid verdix ~$1.5k for VADS6.03 on the sparcII.
>now, our local sunrep quoted ~$10k for SUNada.
>
>we're now looking for alternatives to SUNada.
>can u suggest an ada compiler which is more reasonably priced than SUNada?

This is a _very_ real proble, ... At Bristol Poly we upgraded to Sun 4/690 &
Solbourne 5/800 + lots of Solbourne S4000s & a few Sun 4/IPCs, and in the
process had to upgrade from Alsys Ada. We chose SunAda (alias Verdix) because
we were told that 'it supports up to 60 users from the one license' & when
asked about whether that license was machine-specific were told 'no'. Of
course, on receiving the product we discovered that it was indeed
machine-based so that all users now had to log into a single machine to do Ada
compilations. Whilst the Ada compiler doesn't vex the 4/690 too much, AdaVision
slays it with more that 10 users at once. Its a complete waste of our S4000's
(28 MIPS and all) to just use them as glorified X-Terminals when using Ada, but
it will cost extortionate amounts to get licenses for the 32 S4000s. Meanwhile,
other users of the 4/690 are thoroughly fed up with Ada users, and the 4/690
looks laughably underpowered. It's difficult to explain to new (naive) Unix
users that a machine such as that falls flat because of so few Ada users !

Any other compiler manufacturers like to come to the rescue (or Sun have a
_BIG_ rethink about their academic policy!) ?





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| Alwyn Barry, Senior Lecturer,          Ph: 0044 272 656261 extn. 3135 |
| Computer Science Department, Bristol Polytechnic, Bristol, Avon, U.K. |