Re: Help help.. please.i am totaly new in ada programing

[Robert Dewar <dewar@gnat.com>]

In article <3819A44A.9F5E6B97@maths.unine.ch>,
  Gautier <Gautier.deMontmollin@maths.unine.ch> wrote:
> A propos... is there a _completely free_ downloadable
> Ada95 solution (e.g. a shell+gnat) for MacOS ?


A little bit of history here with a sad ending.

The original RFP for the educational compiler required compilers
to be generated for Windows and the Mac. Surprisingly there was
no requirement that these be free software. This came from two
things:

  1. Despite GNAT, the general perception of the importance
     of free and open source software was not fully perceived.

  2. There was a hope that commercial companies, including
     particularly Metaware, who had expressed interest, would
     bid on this project.

There were several bids, and in particular Mike Feldman's bid
based around GNAT included a MAC component that would have
generated a fully free software solution for the Mac.

But the contract went to Intermetrics, and one of the first
things that got pruned was the MAC component. At the time we
were surprised and disappointed by this development.

At a SIGAda meeting in DC, the director of the AJPO
was asked why this had happened.

In response he told a variation on the old joke about
wondering whether an express train should stop at a given
station ("no, we checked to see if anyone was waiting for
the express at that stop, and no one was, so there is no
point in having the train stop").

He said that they had done a survey and found no one was
using the MAC to teach Ada currently, so there was no point
in providing a tool which would allow them to do so. I kid
you not, that is what he said!

Anyway, as you know the educational compiler, based on the
Aonix back ends covered windows, but not the MAC (Aonix,
well really Alsys, had an old MAC compiler but they had
abandoned it long ago).

Subsequently two developments helped the situation on the Mac.

Intermetrics developed their Java based product, which will
run on the Mac, but as Tucker Taft noted, this was never
completed as a full Ada system.

ACT and Tenon did a small contract (about $100,000 if I remember
right, a tiny fraction of what was spent on the educational
compiler contract) to put GNAT on the Mac using Tenon's Code
Builder. This resulted in a fully validated distributed product.
ACT did not continue full support of this product, because there
were no paying customers (more accurately there was one, but
they abandoned the approach because of problems in the Tenon
system). As usual, the AJPO did not provide for long term
maintenance. Luckily Jim has kept this system up to date, and
as you have seen new versions of GNAT that work in this
environment continue to appear from his very welcome volunteer
efforts.

Of course, there is no cost free solution under Windows either,
since you have to pay for NT or Windows (perhaps it comes with
your PC, but that just means the cost is included in the cost
of the PC). The only really free solution in the PC world is
to run GNAT on GNU Linux :-)

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies


Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.