Re: Standard Ada Preprocessor (Was: why ada is so unpopular ?)

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

Warren W. Gay VE3WWG wrote:
> 
> And what I find amusing is that except for a few that
> appreciate this issue, we've heard of every ugly
> work-around possible, rather than face the issue
> square in the eye. This is just my opinion mind you,
> and perhaps small things amuse me ;-)
> 
Perhaps it starts from noble intentions. There are certainly a large 
number of cases where a C programmer might dive into conditional 
compilation when a more "pure" approach might yield an answer that is 
more elegant and less subject to errors. But having decided from such 
examples that "Conditional Compilation = Evil" we then see increasingly 
complex, difficult to implement and (often) non-portable and inefficient 
schemes to try to work around not having it. After a while you start 
wondering "what was it I was trying to avoid with all these gyrations 
and was it really so bad???"

> 
> As Ada stands now, it only serves the less portable
> embedded environment. If people truly do want to see
> wide-spread adoption of Ada, you will need to
> improve the portability to a level that competes
> well with C/C++.
> 
Remember that when it comes to embedded systems, "Ada" ranks below 
"Other" in choice of programming language. Somehow, Ada failed to pay 
attention to the embedded customer and got profoundly ignored in return. 
So having blown that market - probably permanently - it should likely 
not worry so much about that market and concentrate on others.

Having said that, I'd dispute that embeded computing has any less need 
for portability than any other area. Perhaps at times even more need for 
portability. You're often trying to write code that will work with 
off-line simulations, prototype boards, different variants of production 
boards, multiple versions of RTOS's, etc. Further, because these systems 
might hang around for many generations of hardware, they have to be 
adaptable to change. So yes, I get to worry a whole lot about 
portability of code. ;-)


> As for me, based upon what I have seen in this group,
> I'll just go on using gnatprep like I always have. The
> fact that ACT created this tool, and the fact that I
> and others use it, demonstrates a need that is not yet
> satisfied by the standard.

Since tools *are* invented to do this sort of thing regularly, it would 
be nice to have a *standard* set of tools one could count on having in 
place. People find a way of getting what they want. Sometimes its done 
by switching languages.

MDC

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Marin David Condic
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