Re: Ada Core Technologies and Ada95 Standards

[Laurent.Guerby@enst-bretagne.fr (Laurent Guerby)]

Ken Garlington writes
[deleted]
: And yet, it's _not_ a mistake to mandate ACVC for non-DoD users? Why?
[deleted]

   The key idea here  is the time (and money)  spent on such items (as
already pointed out by Robert Dewar). The time and  money spent by all
Ada  vendors to reach ACVC compliance  is _not_  spent in GUI builder,
external tools, and other goodies.  If you require compliance with one
million tests, you won't get any tool (and may be not even a compiler,
or worse, only one compiler for your platform ...).

   Think about C++ compilers which are known  to be weak and buggy for
many  features of the (evolving)  draft  C++ standard,  but which  are
coming  with a  good set   of  programming  tools (windows,   editors,
profilers, libraries ...) that people like.

   If you want to enter the Ada market, ACVC is the recognized minimum
for  any "decent" compiler.  It's   already  a  _lot_ of work   (time,
money). And it does an useful (but limited) job.

   But it is a "mistake" to  require more for  every Ada compiler used
by every  Ada  programmer.  Most C/C++ programmers  are  using a buggy
C/C++ compiler  without asking more  than 93.1416%  ANSI C/POSIX/Draft
C++/Whatever compliance and are quite happy with it ;-).

   Of course, if  you have to handle a  big  and serious project,  you
will ask more  from your vendor  (ACES,  other test suites,  ISO 9000,
certifications, etc ...).

[Just student's  thoughts, I    haven't any  real experience   on  the
subject,  except with buggy language X   compilers (a lot of compilers
and Xs) ;-]

-- 
--  Laurent Guerby, student at Telecom Bretagne (France), Team Ada.
--  "Use the Source, Luke. The Source will be with you, always (GPL)."
--  http://www-eleves.enst-bretagne.fr/~guerby/ (GATO Project).
--  Try GNAT, the GNU Ada 95 compiler (ftp://cs.nyu.edu/pub/gnat).