Re: GNAT Programming System - Wow

[dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar)]

"Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org> wrote in message news:<aau2tk$l51$1@nh.pace.co.uk>...

> From a marketing standpoint, its probably a mistake to
> name it after a popular satelite based navigation system.

The name of the system is the GNAT Programming System. The
informal acronym (which is not the official name of the
product) does indeed have an interesting overloading, and
if it gets people to argue about the name, that's OK with
us :-) A lot of people presumed to advise us that GNAT was
a bad choice from a marketing point of view, but it seems
to have worked out pretty well :-)

I would ask that if there are those who have nothing better
to do with their time than argue over the name that they
start a different thread. It will probably be more useful
to more people if this thread concentrates on other perhaps
more important aspects of the GNAT Programming System.

P.S. The reason there is no Ada in the name is that this
product is not Ada specific, it contains for example full
browsing capabilities for C++. We see this as necessary for
our Ada customers, many of whom are doing mixed language
programming involving Ada, C and/or C++.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies

And if Marin is worried about confusion on his resume, I
definitely advise using the proper name of the product in
this context, and not the informal acronym!