Re: Verdix Corp ADA-language development systems

[dee@linus.UUCP (David E. Emery)]

Our experience with verdix and generics does not match that reported
by baur.  In particular, I personally think that Verdix has the best
implementation of generics of any compiler I've used.  It's not 100% 
perfect, but it's a lot better than most compilers.

Verdix is 1 of only 2 compilers that that I know to implement code
sharing of generic bodies.  Furthermore, Verdix does NOT require that
the body of a generic be compiled before its instantiation.  It is
possible to write mutually dependent generics (each generic
instantiates the other) in Verdix, where most compilers will gag on
such code.  

We're using Vads 5.5(j) on Sun-3.  This release has its problems, but
I don't consider generics an issue.  

Verdix customer support is spotty.  They have some of the brightest
customer people I've worked with, but these people are stretched
fairly thin.  The documentation has gotten much better with 5.5.  
A.make does have some problems, I avoid using it on very large
projects.  There has been a long delay between the time bugs get
reported and isolated and the next release of the compiler that fixes
the bug.   On the other hand, the debugger is nice, although there are
a few bugs and enhancements it could use, too.  It's the easiest
debugger I've used to debug tasks and generics (and tasks in generics,
which is a very rough topic...)

There have been some problems with the optimizer and particularly with
floating point numbers, plus some particularly annoying bugs in static
array initialization (mentioned by baur, but there's a fairly simple
workaround) and variant records (which I think may have been fixed in
5.5j). 

I have no reservations about using Verdix for use on large projects in a
Unix self-hosted environment.  

				dave emery
				emery@mitre-bedford.arpa