Re: Is 3.15p -still- the latest GNAT 'p' release?

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic.brenta@insalien.org>]

Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com> writes:

> Well, we might discover that Microsoft actually *agrees* with that
> assessment in the sense that they can see their own customers
> resisting purchasing new versions of software because the old ones
> still work & get the job done fine. Hence, they have to keep coming up
> with schemes to either tempt you or force you to buy the next
> generation product. That's one reason they feel so threatened by
> things like Linux and Open Office - sooner or later those products
> stabilize and provide 99.9% of all the features anyone really needs
> and so why does someone need to buy a new generation of word processor
> or spreadsheet?

Yes, this is why they keep changing the file formats for no apparent
reason.  And that is why I systematically complain when people send me
data in an opaque data format such as Microsoft Word or Excel, even
though I can read them with OpenOffice.

The other trick they use is to change the architecture every few
years, so that the development tools sold by their competitors
(Borland, IBM, Watcom) are obsolete.  As for the third-party
applications, they have to be rewritten using Microsoft development
tools.  Microsoft don't mind that they, too, have to rewrite their
apps, because it allows them to sell new versions that are "up to
date" and "integrated with the latest Windows".  They are working on
this right now; the next version of Windows ("Longhorn") will
deprecate the Win32 API, COM, and ActiveX in favour of .Net.  I expect
that new "up-to-date" versions of Microsoft Office, SQL Server,
etc. will follow.

> Ada compiler vendors OTOH can likely count on ongoing language
> changes, new computer architectures to target and continual
> improvement in the efficiency and quality of the code they generate to
> keep demand up for new releases of a compiler. But still, I've had
> projects freeze the compiler version in order to achieve stability and
> were still able to get the job done. Old software that works is often
> "Good Enough".

Yes.  At Barco we use a compiler released in 1999.  It is good enough.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.