Re: Assembler in Ada?

[robert_dewar@my-dejanews.com]

In article <78hj3k$2tn$1@remarQ.com>,
  "news.oxy.com" <Vladimir_Olensky@oxy.com> wrote:
> This passage can be easily understood  that the public
> distribution of GNAT is not intended for serious GNAT
> users, as it does not include GCC manual. But everything
> in your hands. Just include this manual  into public GNAT
> distribution and then every serious GNAT user will have
> that manual at hand.

In fact the public distribution of GNAT is intended
primarily for student use, and it seems inappropriate
to include the gcc manual, since this will be of use
only to a very small fraction of advanced users who can
perfectly well go and get the GCC manual for themselves
(indeed it is available in a very nice bound form from
FSF, available at your local bookstores, including Barnes
and Noble).

> In my previous message I just wanted to point out that
> that the GNAT documentation set is insufficient:
> "ALL THE REFERENCIES FROM ANY PIECE OF THE SYSTEM
> DOCUMENTATION SHOULD BE RESOLVED WITHIN THE SET OF
> MANUALS THAT COMES WITH
> THE GIVEN SYSTEM. Otherwise the documentation does not
> work."

I am not sure why you think SHOUTING at me is likely to
convince me :-) But indeed the documentation supplied with
GNAT is far from complete for most users. In particular,
we make no attempt at all to provide informal documentation
on how to use Ada 95, and that of course is something most
users will need.


> And once more, include GCC manual into the GNAT
> distribution ! It is so obvious and simple !

It is also obvious and simple for the few people who need
it to obtain it for themselves. There are many things we
could include in the distribution that might be useful to
a few people (lots of useful bindings come to mind), but
we have to make a decision on each item as to whether
enough people will use it to make it worth while.

In our judgment, unchanged by your arguments, the GCC
manual is of interest to too small a segment of GNAT users
to be worth including in all distributions.

> And do not take critical opinions of the GNAT weak sides
> as a personal or team  offence. They are suggestions for
> improvement. Just make GNAT better taking them into
> account. Sometimes such statements should more polemic to
> cause some kind of reaction from the other side.

I do not regard these as critical opinions, merely
suggestions, which we always welcome, and may or may not
follow depending on our judgment. A polemic style will
neither help nor hurt in getting your suggestions accepted,
since they are evaluated on their technical merits by us.

<<irrelevant stuff about submarines snipped>>

> Hope to discuss more general things later. As a matter of
> fact this one (assembler , not nuclear submarine)  was
> not very big issue. There are some others that are of
> much great importance for Ada future.

I would prefer to keep the discussion more focussed on
technical issues relating to Ada.

By the way, I appreciate that you may have more difficulty
downloading from your location than some others, but in
fact keeping distributions small and avoiding the inclusion
of unnecessary items that are easily obtained separately
is especially important in such circumstances.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies

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