Re: Ada for the Mac

[kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen)]

In article <dewar.842363129@schonberg>, dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:
> Neil O'Brien says
> 
> "You sort of answered your own statement, we never upgraded because it was
> originally a product too few customers wanted. A perception (valid or not)
> is that the mac is not a serious development platform for embedded systems
> (and markets where Ada / Ada95 is generally strong), whilst that
> perception continues I doubt if any vendor is willing to swallow the
> development costs in the hope a market would be able to pay back these
> development costs and support future upgrades.
> "
> 
> Neil may speak for Tompson, but he should not speak for "any vendor".
> 
> Ada Core Technologies will be fully supporting GNAT on the Mac Power PC
> platform, using MachTen as the development environment (rather than
> MPW as had been used by Mac Ada compilers in the past -- Machten provides
> a familiar Unix environment). Applications can be generated to either
> run under Machten, which is fully integrated with System 7, or under
> System 7 directly.

But ACT has the advantage of not having to swallow "development costs",
which both means that Neil's doubts remain unchallenged and means that
we have a method to get supported Ada for at least one of the two MacOS
platforms.

If Ada on MacOS were wildly successful, I would hope someone like
ThomSoft (or whatever they are called by they) could see their way
to developing a Macintosh Ada which did _not_ look like Unix to the
developer.

Larry Kilgallen
Much more familiar with MacOS than Unix