Re: PDA Ada

[dennison@telepath.com (Ted Dennison)]

Richard Riehle <richard@adaworks.com> wrote in message news:<3DA4E4A8.5C1DEAE0@adaworks.com>...
> Does anyone know if there is any on-going effort to
> create an Ada compiler for PDA's.

I've never heard of one.

> We are going to
> miss a huge market opportunity if we fail to be ready
> for this burgeoning part of the embedded marketplace.

PDA's may sell a lot of units, but that doesn't mean their compiler
market is huge.

> I fear no one in the compiler publishing community takes
> PDA's seriously because there are no customers.

Possibly. 

A collegue of mine came in here a few years back with a similar
argument about VenturCOM's RTX (realtime extensions for Windows). My
personal opinion is that we should have siezed the oppertunity to port
Gnat to it ourselves. We had no compunction about doing that with
Fortran (which we couldn't do without, due to large amounts of legacy
code). C++ in RTX is turning out to be 10 times the nightmare I had
feared.

Realisticly, its up to compiler companies to decide for themselves
that there's a profitable niche open or them in a marginal market like
PDAs, DSPs, RTX, etc. If they don't, but motivated users ask for it,
one would think it quite reasonable for the vendor to expect said
motivated users to pony up at least some of the deveolpment costs.

Or of course the users could just do it themselves. It looks like it
would be doable. There appears to be a Palm version of GCC. The
processor looks like a 68K variant, which has been known to support
full Ada compilers in the past.