Re: Porting ADA source

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

Its all rather hypothetical, considering we don't really know what the 
whole situation is. I naturally agree that if one builds a system and 
thinks there is a potential need to port, one ought to design in the 
portability from the start. (Isolate the dependencies at a low level). I 
also would agree that if a system has a long and profitable future ahead 
of it, one might be wise to look at a porting situation as an 
opportunity to fix things that were not designed for portability (or 
other structural problems that may exist).

My observation would be that there is a large class of systems where 
there might be some generally useful capabilities that someone wants to 
preserve for some relatively small body of users and are therefore 
porting them to more available hardware, but the systems just plain 
aren't worth any significan effort to do it "right". Gold plating on 
systems like this is mostly a waste of resources and I like to see ways 
of avoiding building Brick Outhouses when this comes up. It happens far 
more frequently than cases where there is some immensely valuable and 
profitable tool that is worth investing some redesign effort in.

MDC



Robert I. Eachus wrote:
> 
> I'll second Randy on this first.  Quick and dirty gets to "sort of 
> working" faster, but doing it right seems to get to working faster, and 
> definitely gets to no bugs much faster.
> 
> However, there is an issue here that may require living with two 
> versions for a long-time: the need to compile using the DEC Ada compiler 
> which AFAIK is Ada 83 only.  I believe that GNAT is available for some 
> Alpha OSes.  (I don't know which Unix variant this is.)
> 
> I think that the right path forward would be to migrate the code to 
> GNAT, then use the GNAT version on the Alpha system.  It may be a lot 
> simpler than any other approach, and it certainly should reduce the 
> support costs going forward.
> 


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Marin David Condic
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