Re: ACT announces availability of GNAT 3.14p

[dmitry@elros.cbb-automation.de (Dmitry A. Kazakov)]

On Sun, 03 Feb 2002 03:07:42 -0500, Leon Winslow
<leon.winslow@eliminatespam.notes.udayton.edu> wrote:

>Robert Dewar wrote:
>
>> Ada Core Technologies (ACT) has made available at the NYU
>> site (ftp://cs.nyu.edu/pub/gnat) GNAT 3.14p builds for the
>> following targets:
>>
>> MS Windows (NT/2K)
>> Sparc Solaris (2.5.1 through 2.8)
>> GNU Linux (Redhat 6.2)
>>
>> The above are the official platforms, but in practice the
>> NT version works reasonable well on Win 98 and Win ME and
>> other versions of GNU Linux including Debian GNU/Linux are
>> known to be compatible with this version of GNAT.
>>
>> These are the only public versions that ACT plans to build.
>> As always, the releases contain the full sources, and we
>> invite volunteers to create builds for other platforms.  We
>> also draw attention to the availability of source snapshots
>> for the current development version of GNAT (similar to the
>> 3.15 release, but on GCC 3, rather than GCC 2).  The above
>> public versions are still based on ACT's 2.8.1 GCC version.
>>
>> These versions are provided without any warranty or
>> guarantee of any kind, and no support of any kind is
>> available for these public versions from ACT.  They are
>> provided as a service for use by students, hobbyists and
>> researchers who need access to a high quality Ada 95
>> system.
>>
>> handling
>
>I can understand the reason for limiting ACTs work to Windows NT, but
>this is also one of the  reason that Ada is "sliding into oblivion."
>The majority of the programming is being done on Windows platforms other
>than NT and 2K.  (MS has already announced dates for dropping all suport
>of these two platforms.).  A compiler that works "reasonably well" in
>W98, XP or Me is never going to be used on those platforms for any
>serious work.

Actually among Windows clones, NT is the most widely used platform in
industry [=best approximation of serious work]. This situation will
not change in one day or month. No matter whether Microsoft like it or
not. Then, XP is a successor of NT/2k, not Win 95/98/me. Yet XP is far
less stable [if this word can be applied to Microsoft products] than
NT. So IMO ACT does it well. I believe there should be no big problems
with using GNAT under XP. What I would wish, is GNAT for Win CE, but I
also understand the reasons why ACT does not support it.

>Alas, I knew Ada well and hate to see it go down hill, but ....

Regards,
Dmitry Kazakov