From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.7 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,LOTS_OF_MONEY, MSGID_RANDY autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,b50bc6538a649497 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2000-11-19 19:32:02 PST Path: supernews.google.com!sn-xit-03!supernews.com!xfer13.netnews.com!netnews.com!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.gtei.net!news.maxwell.syr.edu!nntp2.deja.com!nnrp1.deja.com!not-for-mail From: Robert Dewar Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Ada student homework ? Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2000 03:18:38 GMT Organization: Deja.com - Before you buy. Message-ID: <8va56a$e1n$1@nnrp1.deja.com> References: <8v9l58$210$1@nnrp1.deja.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 205.232.38.240 X-Article-Creation-Date: Mon Nov 20 03:18:38 2000 GMT X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/4.61 [en] (OS/2; I) X-Http-Proxy: 1.0 x60.deja.com:80 (Squid/1.1.22) for client 205.232.38.240 X-MyDeja-Info: XMYDJUIDrobert_dewar Xref: supernews.google.com comp.lang.ada:2249 Date: 2000-11-20T03:18:38+00:00 List-Id: In article , tmoran@acm.org wrote: > > Is there? Not "anyone can ...", or "... has been at least > fiddling with GtkAda,", but "Is there a release sequence of > GtkAda versions that have been developed and tested with > multiple Ada compilers?" No idea! We are not planning to make money selling GtkAda for use with Rational etc compilers, so we are not in the business of providing releases for other vendors compilers. > CLAW users have full source code and there is certainly no > more impediment to them making it work on some new fifth or > sixth Ada compiler than to users making GtkAda work on a > second or third or fourth existing or new Ada compiler. Oh but there is! And you should not lose sight of it. There is nothing to stop Rational or Aonix from selling and supporting a version of GtkAda that works with their compilers. Far from preventing it, we are happy to encourage it, and as I mentioned we have responded to a few minor inputs from Rational on some minor incompatibilities that were easily corrected. With CLAW on the other hand, unless I misunderstand the license, it would be a copyright and license violation for a third party to produce this fifth port and sell it themselves. If the CLAW license DOES allow free creation, distribution, and sale-for-profit of deriviative versions, then it is indeed Free Software in the normal sense, and it is a bad example for my comparison. > In fact, if a new Ada compiler does not show any bugs or > weirdnesses that need workarounds, porting CLAW may need no > changes at all! It is true that we have taken it > upon ourselves to do that work for CLAW Presumably because you intend to make money selling it for these other compilers, seeing as you have exclusive rights to do so. > I'm happy to hear that ACT has "been happy to cooperate with > them [Rational] on this [porting GtkAda]." As I said, we have no objection at all to other vendors using parts of our technology that are complimentary. Indeed there are quite a few users using mixtures of GNAT and Rational technology, why not? > To return to t previous topic, I trust we agree that > GtkAda's portability across OSes sometimes, but not always, > exceeds its disadvantages in missing functionality under > Windows and its portability problems across Ada compiler > vendors. It's not a "disadvantage" of GtkAda that it does not take advantage of some special Windows features, it is a critical part of its design that it be portable across systems. As to portability problems, I have no knowledge that there are more problems in GtkAda than in CLAW. I know that you have encountered quite a few portability problems with CLAW which required new versions of compilers etc that fixed bugs (I know we have fixed a couple of bugs that CLAW showed up, since it uses quite complex features of Ada). In the case of GtkAda, so far, we have not encountered any significant portability problems, and those we have encountered were fixed by trivial changes in the source. For example, GNAT was allowing pragma Preelaborate in a package body, and there were a couple of such instances in the GtkAda sources -- so we simply made trivial changes to the sources (and fixed the GNAT bug that allowed these wrongly placed pragmas, a bug which interestingly had never been noticed before :-) Certainly it would be our intention to make any such necessary corrections if and when they prove to be needed. One advantage of trying to keep the sources as simple as possible, and therefore easily portable across compilers is that it makes it easier to use GtkAda with various different versions of GNAT. Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ Before you buy.