Re: Is the "Ada mandate" being reconsidered?

[Tom Robinson <robinson@gdesystems.com>]

fjh@mundook.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Fergus Henderson) wrote:
>Tom Robinson <robinson@gdesystems.com> writes:
>>[someone writes]:
>>>Thomson's ObjectAda compiler is dirt cheap for personal
>>>use and the professional version is cheaper than a "professional" C++
>>>package.  Also, Gnat is on all sorts of platforms.
>>
>>Is it really?  When I look at the Ada 95 validated compiler list it 
>>looks pretty small to me.  So you're saying that gnat is available as
>>long as I am willing to pay for a validation and arrange for maintenence
>>or do it myself.  
>
>If the competition is C++ compilers, then I don't see what validation
>has to do with it.  I mean it's not as if you are going to find any
>validated C++ compilers.
>

Ah, well perhaps I am too tied to the "old" Ada business.  It used to be that
before you could claim you even had a product you would perform a validation
on the compiler.  This put you on the "validated compilers list", a form
of advertising.  It was also recognized that validation was merely the first
step of producing an Ada product.  I mean validation doesn't even require you
to produce a debugger!  It doesn't address the quality of the generated code
at all.  But, validation does at least test that the compiler does successfully
process the Ada language (at least to some minimal level).

Look, I think the validation process is a good thing.  It has a third party
verify that an Ada vendors claims about having run the ACVC and passed the
suite are true.  That should not be that big a deal.  I also believe that the
validation process is one of the things that Ada has going for it.  I am not
really in touch with C++, but I have heard that one of its problems is that
some of the language features are implemented inconsistently by the C++
vendor community.

And, *I thought*, that the DOD was required to use validated compilers.  But
I could be wrong on that.  But *if it does*, then in order to sell to the DOD
companies would need to be on the validation list.  Since the list is extremely
small when compared to Ada 83 I use it as the measure of how far along the
Ada 95 market is today.  One measure of how successful Ada 95 is will be how
fast that list grows in the next 12 months as the gnat and AdaMagic based
compilers start hitting the market.

Tom Robinson