Re: [Fwd: F22 completes 11% of its Flight tests]

[Bill Greene <wrg@Ganymede.com>]

jtarver wrote:
> 
> Bill Greene <wrg@Ganymede.com> wrote in message
> news:387CEE4A.3965@Ganymede.com...
> > jtarver wrote:
> >
> > > Ada was originally envisioned to be platform transparent.  When Data
> General
> > > produced the only 100% compliant compliler and the Ada development
> program
> > > went for the noncompliant VAX as their standard platform that idea was
> out
> > > the window.
> >
> > I don't understand your statement.  IIRC, there was a validated Ada 83
> > compiler for the Data General (written by Rational?) and there were
> > several validated Ada 83 compilers for the DEC VAX (written by SofTech,
> > DEC, and others).  What do you mean by "noncompliant VAX"?
> 
> I mean the first rule of the compliance was that there be no extensions and
> VAX immediately violated that rule.

The only mechanism I know of for gauging compliance is formal
validation, which included passing the thousands of tests in the ACVC
(now ACATS) test suite.  There were and are a number of validated Ada
compilers for the VAX.

But what does it mean to say that "VAX" violated a rule?  Are you
talking about a particular Ada compiler for the VAX?  If so, which
compiler is it and what sort of extensions are you referring to? 
Implementation-defined attributes and pragmas?

Also, it's not entirely accurate to say that Ada was intended to be
platform transparent.
One of the design goals for the language was to allow low-level access
to the underlying architecture, e.g., in code inserts, which are
certainly not portable.  But then, no one writing a code insert for a
VAX would ever expect that code to be portable to a non-VAX platform.

> 
> > FWIW, my experiences with porting Ada (83 or 95) code have been quite
> > satisfactory.
> 
> What did you port as the new platform?

I've ported among VAX, Sun, Apollo, Windows, OS/2, IBM mainframes, and
Macintosh, to name a few off the top of my head.

-- 
William R. Greene                              1100 Perimeter Park Drive
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