From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,23a17bbd96d53327 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@gnat.com Subject: Re: Assembler in Ada? Date: 1999/01/27 Message-ID: <78m4kk$3tc$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 437225405 References: <369C5E08.69727537@mbox5.swipnet.se> <78a32f$dbr$1@remarQ.com> <78fv79$7mj$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <78hj3k$2tn$1@remarQ.com> <78igfq$32g$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <78kev8$k1f$1@remarQ.com> X-Http-Proxy: 1.0 x2.dejanews.com:80 (Squid/1.1.22) for client 205.232.38.14 Organization: Deja News - The Leader in Internet Discussion X-Article-Creation-Date: Wed Jan 27 04:28:13 1999 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/4.04 [en] (OS/2; I) Date: 1999-01-27T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article <78kev8$k1f$1@remarQ.com>, "news.oxy.com" wrote: > I have the impression that there are a lot of users of > GNAT that are not students but much more advanced users > as well as people (in non military areas) that want to > experiment with Ada and consider public releases of Ada > as some initial stage in evaluating different aspects and > approaches (including choice of compiler systems and > tools) to the design of their systems (hard/soft). As > result of such evaluation they may or may not choose > Ada as their primary platform for system development. If > they choose GNAT for that then they will buy commercial > support from ACT for their development. That may be true, but we discourage using the public version for serious evaluation of GNAT or of Ada 95. That is because a serious project will find that they can do a much more successful evaluation if they use a fully supported product for the evaluation. We encourage anyone doing such an evaluation to contact sales@gnat.com or sales@act-europe.fr to arrange for an evaluation contract. Our experience is that this is by far the most effective way to introduce the use of GNAT and Ada 95. The use of unsupported software can be frustrating for anyone, and indeed, it is often during the initial periods of trying to use a new product that support is most needed. > I think that ACT should do whatever possible to help > making such decisions. As above, we would definitely prefer that people seriously evaluating Ada 95 use a supported product from us or from one of our competitors for this purpose. In the case of the particular issue at hand, the successful and judicious use of assembler inserts, this is indeed an area where it is useful to have help from gcc knowledgable experts, and we have helped a small number of customers in this area. Only a small number, because most customers of ours completely avoid the use of assembly language. We find that people trying to do this on their own often make mistakes similar to those that Vladimir made in his incorrect examples. In particular, understanding the clobbers and volatile arguments is tricky. These are indeed documented in the gcc manual, but unless you have a reasonable understanding of the context of RTL, this documentation may not be entirely clear. > This is OK but future of Ada depends not only on the > quality of the language itself and it's technical issues. > If nothing extraordinary will be done to improve > situation in the near future (easy to use RAD environment <> Many people have various ideas on how to make Ada succeed. Useful thinking in this area needs a lot of experience in how the market really works. Vladimir, I suggest you do a thorough back search of the dejanews archives to see discussions of this issue in the past. The reason incidentally that you have been disappointed in no one really wanting to discuss your ideas, and certainly in the vendors not responding is that there is nothing new in your ideas, and these ideas and many other ideas have been discussed to death in the past! Certainly we appreciate your enthusiasm for Ada. Are you by the way in touch with Sergey Rybin, who is the principle architect of AIS-for-GNAT, and lives in Moscow? Sounds like it would be a good idea. Figuring out cost-effective ways of spreading Ada is of course important. Certainly we and other vendors spend a lot of effort on this subject. It is a lot harder than you might suppose, it is all too easy to spend lots of money in this area and accomplish very little or even less than nothing! Robert Dewar Ada Core Technologies Robert Dewar Ada Core Technologies -----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==---------- http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own