Re: ez2load helping Ada

[James E. Hopper <jhopper@erinet.com>]

In article <009A53B0E71F30C3.8AB2@smcsr3.smcs.se.baesema.co.uk> ,
Chris.Morgan@BAESEMA.CO.UK writes: >  I have been spending some time
handing out copies of the EZ2LOAD package >assembled by Prof Mike
Feldman and co. I just want to say that, now this >version includes
tasking, it is really starting to attract serious attention.
>Ironically this GNAT port runnning on perhaps the worst operating of
all the >ones it is ported to, is one of the most important. Important
that is for >helping the spread of Ada into grass-roots/home
computing. It gives Ada a >chance to win the hearts and minds of the
young people who will be building the >big systems in the 21st
century.

i agree getting down to the home machine level is where the hearts and
minds are won.  i seldom get real serious about something i cant use
at my home computer. i didnt get serious about learning Ada till
meridian ada for the mac came out. until then i managed an ada project
by writing my stuff in pascal and having it translated by the coders
;-)  (that was a LONG time ago)

i think the new gnat-mac will also help.  right now machten is a big
cost item but we are going to be showing in august at macworld with
tenon a new machten development system featuring ada which will be
cost comparable with codewarror mpw etc [including student discounts]
tasking is pretty much working (a few bugs yet to work out but close).
the mac world will be interesting cause a lot of the mac developers
started out in pascal and they are still resisting c++ and even a lot
of them doing c++ wish for an alternative.  i am hoping we can
position ada as pascal++ ;-)  its going to be a while before its as
slick as codewarrior but all the tools are there to build a
codewarrior style IDE in ada now.

we have also had some success getting interest in mac tools
developers. the publishers of the best of the mac text editors is
going to add emacs adamode style support for ada 95 to his product
soon.  i got an interesting note from a commercial company which is
interested in switching to Ada and now that there is a mac compiler
they are experimenting with it on their machines.

also we are able to build standalone mac OS application that do not
require machten, see ftp.cs.nyu.edu in /pub/mac/powermac for examples
shell.bin, hello.bin, sillyballs.bin. these are powermac only and you
have to decode them with macbinary when you download them (most mac
tools support this as part of the download)/ shell and sillyballs are
standard mac development ssytem demos that are used to demo their mac
support. these demos talk about gnat and i hope tweek peoples
interests in Ada.

Oh and we have a VERY friendly and pretty installer as well like ezload,
but we still have to work on an ide.  i am afraid that will have to be 
a volunteer effort for the future.

best jim