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From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: ada compiler for os/2
Date: 10 Mar 1995 11:18:22 -0500
Organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
Message-ID: <3jpu4e$bls@gnat.cs.nyu.edu>
References: <3jj8cqINNoho@edna.cc.swin.edu.au>
 <3jjcpc$7j@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> <3jlu96INN24f@edna.cc.swin.edu.au>
NNTP-Posting-Host: gnat.cs.nyu.edu
Date: 1995-03-10T11:18:22-05:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

is Gnat Ada and Gnu Ada validated Ada compilers?
They would be pretty useless if they are not.

Gosh, I guess this means that all C++ compilers are pretty useless :-)

Seriously, there is no such thing as a validated Ada 95 compiler yet, since
the test suite is not yet available for validation. However, the test suite
will be available first. NYU is not carrying out validations (our contract
does not allow for that). But SGI will be validating GNAT under IRIX (in
cooperation with ACT), and we expect that other versions will be validated
later.

Incidentally, the original observation shows a naive confidence on validation
that I am afraid is misplaced. Both the following statements are completely
false:

  A validated compiler is usable
  A non-validated compiler is useless

Of course if you are a MANDATED (capitalized in honor of GA) environment
where the use of a validated compiler is mandatory, then you will have to
wait for GNAT to be validated to use it. Notice however, that there is a policy
in place that permits research and prototyping to be done using non-validated
Ada 95 compilers (I am not quite sure of the exact wording).

In fact we have a lot of users doing serious work with GNAT now, so it
is definitely not useless :-)