Meridian Mac compiler

Meridian Mac compiler

[Sandy Wilbourn]

There have been a number of message on the net lately about how
Meridian has orphaned its Mac compiler. (e.g. hasn't updated the
environment library to all System 7 calls, isn't Think Pascal-like,
etc.).  As a person who has been involved in some of the decisions
about the product, I thought I'd throw in my two cents. There are a
number of reasons for our degree of commitment, mostly economic.  First
of all, Apple's Federal group has decided that A/UX is the system for
bidding government projects so that discourages us from building a
more sophisticated Mac O/S product. Secondly, we spent significant
time building the current environment library, put some work into the
code generator, and offered the Mac O/S product at a substantial
discount with a fair number of takers, but it still sold roughly an
order of magnitude less than our Open Ada DOS (although anyone could
argue that the DOS product is more featureful). Thirdly, (a
psychological reason) the Mac O/S market has been hostile to Ada in
the past. A couple of years ago a representative of Meridian presented
a talk about Meridian Ada at a Mac user conference and was loudly
booed when he was introduced! Fourthly, we gave our technology away to
a group(which will remain nameless) 3.5 years ago with the
understanding that they would make the product more Mac-like, and we would
sell it. However, the group lost its research funding.

Notwithstanding all of the comments on the net, these other facts 
doesn't make Meridian want to invest scarce resources into such a
product.  Meridian wants to make OpenAda Mac better, but can't justify
much extra effort based upon what we've seen in the market.
However, if you believe there is a latent market for a better
OpenAda on the Mac, and want to contribute to building a solution
to this problem, you should contact me. For example, one solution might
be for someone to build/extend the current ToolBox interface to 
System 7 in exchange for a royalty (or we would distribute it as free/share
ware if that's what you want).

Sandy Wilbourn
Director of Development
Meridian Software Systems, Inc.
10 Pasteur Street
Irvine, CA  92718
srw@meridian.com
714-727-0700