Re: Ada grammar

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

In article <YlmS4.10737$wb7.927150@news.flash.net>,
  "Ken Garlington" <Ken.Garlington@computer.org> wrote:

> Depends upon whether GNAT is available on their host platform,
> of course.

Well there are not many general purpose platforms on which Ada
95 support is available and no GNAT port is available. Yes yes,
we know Ken wants an Ada 95 compiler for his ancient Vaxes :-)
but I would hardly call Vax a general purpose platform at this
stage, so bundling GNAT would work, though in practice the
concern would be here that you would have to make a choice
between bundling the supported version of GNAT, which would
add to the costs for a non-GNAT user, or the unsupported
public version, which would mean that your tool was dependent
on a rather large chunk (hundreds of thousands of lines) of
unsupported software.

The use of ASIS for such tools has clear plusses and minuses

The plus is that you have FAR more information (overloading,
entity relationships in general, data layout etc) potentially
available to you.

The minus is that you do indeed end up being pretty tied to
a particular ASIS technology. Yes, you can build your tool
with several different versions of ASIS, but this is at least
as hard as building your tool with different compilers, and
means in practice distributing multiple versions of the tool
in binary, or having people do non-trivial builds from source.

Really you have to look at a given tool and see if the plus
outweighs the minus for the particular tool requirements.




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