Re: Ada Compiler for Educational Use

[wes@obie.UUCP (Barnacle Wes)]

First, let me explain that my only experience with Ada in a production
environment was with VAX Ada in 1985-1986.  It was used on an 11/785
with 9 meg of ram, during minimal-load time (0100-0600).

In article <8805121644.AA02786@june.cs.washington.edu>, pattis@JUNE.CS.WASHINGTON.EDU (Richard Pattis) writes:
[...]
> I am now strongly considering teaching Ada in these classes.  I would
> like to solicit recommendations for compilers: we use a large VAX/VMS
> for instruction, but will also ultimately need compilers for our own
> department's machines (mostly VAX/ULTRIX and Suns).  I am looking for
> a system with short compile times and good error diagnostics; fast run
> times are not as important.

VAX Ada wins on good diagnostics and good (reasonably good) run-times.
Compile times on the 785 mentioned above were abysmal; 20-30 lines per
minute were about the average.

> We typically have 20-40 students logged on at once.

If you're going to have all 20-40 of them using VAX Ada, you'd better
have an 8700, with lotsa memory.

> Also, I am interested in other language related tools, such as
> language sensitive editors, debuggers, and profilers.

DEC has a software development environment of some sort; it includes
LSE (Language Sensitive Editor - cute, eh?) that is very good.  There
is a key sequence which will read the word the cursor is in and then
see if it can find a 'standard library' routine with that name.  If it
does, it will insert a prototype call to the routine into the source
for you.  It works really nice with C, I haven't tried it on Ada.  Of
course the VAX/VMS debugger works with VAX Ada.  I don't know about an
Ada (or VMS) profiling tool.