Re: Ada Core Technologies and Ada95 Standards

[john@assen.demon.co.uk (John McCabe)]

dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) wrote:

<..snip..>
>   That's a misleading. There are many aspects of quality for
>   Ada compilers. Validation helps to measure and assess some of
>   these aspects:

>      (a) full feature coverage
>      (b) accurate interpretation of tricky semantic rules
>      (c) lack of improper extensions

I assume by point (c) that you mean compilers must not contain
improper extensions. That is an interesting point to me since in
another thread somewhere we discussed TLD's implementation of package
Machine_Code. Your response to my description of their implementation
was that this was precisely an improper extension. As this
implementation ahs been around for donkeys years, how did it get
through the validation process with an improper extension as obvious
as that?

<..snip..>

>   In the case of GNAT, if I find a bug that seems like it should be
>   caught by the ACVC suite, I send along a message to the ACVC
>   development group. If appropriate it is discussed by the ACVC
>   review group, but more often than not, it is simply incorporated.

I fear you may be biased towards this type of bug reporting by being
directly involved with the Ada language itself. How many [other]
compiler vendors are this conscientious?

<..snip..>

>P.S. I find it a bit amazing that John McCabe is so unaware of the
>validation status of the compiler he is using. One important piece
>of advice for any user of validatd Ada compilers is to obtain the
>VSR (validation status report), and read it carefully. VSR's are
>public documents, available from the AVO, so even if your vendor
>does not supply a copy (they should), you can obtain one. John,
>along with a lot of other data, the VSR lists the expiration date,
>or points to the documents that define the expiration date.

I don't find it amazing at all! As I have probably mentioned in this
and other threads, I am mandated to use this version of the compiler
by my customer's customer's customer so I don't really give a s**t
about its validation status.

I will however be far more interested in the validation status of any
compiler I have the responsibility for selecting for future projects
(especially the one we're hopefully going to be using a 386 for! - see
elsewhere) and I will certainly bear in mind the advice you have given
in this thread about that.

As an aside, I've noticed that your responses have been formatted
differently over the last couple of weeks - i.e. you've been using
indentation instead of putting quotes around things etc. Just a minor
point but I find it more difficult to follow that way :-)


Best Regards
John McCabe <john@assen.demon.co.uk>