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From: mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)
Subject: Re: Ada and Mac (Was: New version of AppletMagic)
Date: 1996/10/21
Message-ID: <54ge45$5j1@felix.seas.gwu.edu>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 191063126
references: <mheaney-ya023180000610961022420001@news.ni.net>
 <JSA.96Oct14175838@alexandria> <544aj2$c6p@felix.seas.gwu.edu>
 <1996Oct17.074956.1@eisner>
organization: George Washington University
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-10-21T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


In article <1996Oct17.074956.1@eisner>,
Larry Kilgallen <kilgallen@eisner.decus.org> wrote:

>> I could not agree more. Perhaps, if the MachTen CodeBuilder release
>> is a big seller and it's apparent that many people are buying it
>> mostly for GNAT, that will be the necessary impetus. Dunno...

>I had not realized there would be any other reason to buy it.
>Are there capabilities other than Ada that would drive sales,
>or that Tenon might be disposed to believe are driving sales
>of that future product ?

I guess that depends on whether you think it's a good idea to have
a pretty complete BSD-ish system on your Mac that lets you run UN*X
and MacOS side by side. I can think of a number of reasons, especially
for folks with experience in both Mac and UN*X (in school, for instance):

- lots of nice tools and utilities, especially on the Ported Apps
  disk, but also within the standard MachTen; true, these are
  command line utilities, but what the heck - if they're useful,
  they're useful.

- app development for apps that will eventually run on a "big"
  UN*X box, but could be developed on a Mac first. This is a big plus
  for GNAT, of course, but it's not limited to Ada. The relative ease
  of setting up GNU cross-compilers makes the Mac a nice cheap 
  multiplatform development box.

- studying UN*X in school, would like to have it at home, already
  have a Mac at home. Yes, MkLinux is coming along, but as has been
  said here ad nauseam, it only supports a few Mac models at this
  point and does not run alongside MacOS.

- etc. etc.

If the price is right (I dunno what the final prices will be), I think
this is a big win for Ada but also for the more general developer market.
The lack of a Mac GUI on the developer tools is the only disadvantage
I can see, and not everybody thinks that's a disadvantage.

Mike Feldman