Re: Public Release of AdaSAGE (Re: Why is the DOE selling AdaSage?)

[drupp@beaver.cs.washington.edu (Douglas Rupp)]

In article <EACHUS.93Feb11194235@oddjob.mitre.org> eachus@oddjob.mitre.org (Rob
ert I. Eachus) writes:

		....  stuff deleted ...

>
>    3) I have little experience with AdaSAGE and no recent experience,
>but the ordering information lists versions for 80x86, RS/6000, Sun
>SPARC, and AT&T 3B2, with PC versions coming in both Alsys and
>Meridian versions.  Sounds portable (or at least significantly ported)
>to me.
>
>    4)  Last but not least, my only current involvement with AdaSAGE
>is as a potential user who thought that the readers of this newsgroup
>might be interested in this information.
>
>
>					Robert I. Eachus
>
		.... more stuff deleted ...

As I recall AdaSage is distributed in source code form, therefore
it seems to me that an Ada program which needs to have a different version
for each and every platform and compiler in existence just lends credence
to the comments in Greg's last post about lack of portability.

A properly designed and written program should have compiler and platform
dependencies isolated to as few packages as possible.  In general these
dependencies are the command line interface, which is different even
among compilers from the same vendor on different platforms;  and the
interface to the system runtime and C application libraries.  There is
no good reason for a system such as AdaSage to require a different version
for every platform/vendor.

Douglas B. Rupp
drupp@cs.washington.edu