What ever happened to Ada

[Noam Kloos <noam@3wis.nl>]

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Was: Ada on old and Simple systems

What happened to the original philosphy of Ada usage?
I asked a quite general question how to use Ada programs on 8088
and 80286 machines.
I received response in several ways like why don't I buy a 80386 or an
offer to buy an old Ada compiler for 8088 machines.

It is just that i was testdriving the Gnat for Windows95 the first time
and simply compiled the hello.adb. Then tried to run the executable on
an old XT 8088 machine and got the message : 'this program cannot be run
in MSDOS mode'.
This seems to me a bit absurd and analog to over bureaucracy.

I hear programming Ada on an archaic system like the 8088 running DOS is
very slow and hard to use with tasking.

I don't see Ada to be used only for the high power abilities like
concurrency. My Idea of the power of Ada is using a wide range of
platforms with using and reusing a common software library so
maintenance of the combined informationsystems at hand can be optimized
and simplified.

To me it is not so the issue of getting the most out of Ada. When
writing code for less advanced systems and devices there would need to
be a less advanced way of programming too, but at least it can be tested
and maintaned and simpulated on a host computer.

I think the ideal situation is having a main development system
generating code for the target systems with consideration of less able
systems and devices.

I think this is how it was ment to be and maybe was at DoD in the old
days, however it may be another dream that has not come true.

I still see inflexibility and a too close focus on trends like java, the
web and high performance machines.