Re: JAVA and ADA JGNAT

[Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>]

In article <86ncqt$l0p$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com> wrote:
> When Gnat was first under development it was released early
and often. I
> remember trying out a version sometime around '94 that had no
> tasking support and was riddled with bugs.

If you had a version of GNAT in 94 that had no tasking, it
did not come from the GNAT project or ACT, and of course that's
something that we cannot (and do not attempt to prevent) -- the
proliferation of junk versions which are nothing to do with us.

But once the product existed, with proper support, that
precisely defines what we provide (I believe that Ted has
always used the public version, and complained furiously
about it -- his company pays for another compiler, and uses
GNAT, but won't pay for it -- that's quite fine, but it
means he is talking about the public version always without
support, and we have often advised him that we don't recommend
using the public version without support. If he was using a
version without tasking, that's truly a mess.

> Even in '95 it was not uncommon to
> get bugs in simple assignments that involved no new Ada95
> features. I think Gnat *did* get somewhat of a bad reputation
> from those early releases. So perhaps ACT's current policy is
> a reaction to that.

Even as early as 95, many serious users were writing and porting
large applications using GNAT. Yes, there were some bugs, and
most certainly GNAT is more stable now than then, as was true
for all Ada 95 products (well in 95, there were not too many
Ada 95 compilers around, stable or otherwise :-)

In any case there has been no change in ACT policy which is
that whenever we make a release of our commercial product,
we follow it with a public version that is essentially
identical technically (it has a different version number).

Certainly there is always a balance, we don't wait to issue
a public version of GNAT until we are sure it was perfect,
or you would never see even one public release. On the other
hand we try to get things into reasonable stable shape. We
usually get shot at from both sides ["those guys at ACT won't
release things, and keep things secret", and, as I remember
from T.E.D. himself "Let the Moaning begin" when something
in the public version does not work right :-)

The phrase "riddled" with bugs is a bit odd. It likely
reflected the fact that the public version that T.E.D.
was using was flawed, corrupted, put together by someone
other than us, or simply being misused
(you would be amazed at how many bug reports we get [some
of them from T.E.D.] that are simply cases of misunderstanding
Ada 95 or GNAT, and not actually bugs at all :-)

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies


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