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Date: Mon, 19 Oct 92 10:08:35 CDT
From: scase@planet8.sp.unisys.com (Steve Case)
Subject: Re: What compilers does Oracle's PRO*Ada support?
Message-ID: <9210191508.AA25700@planet8.sp.unisys.com>
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

Date: 16 Oct 92 01:04:39 GMT
From: sci34hub!tybrin4!tybse1!swhite@uunet.uu.net  (William C. "Spike" White)
Subject: What compilers does Oracle's PRO*Ada support?
Message-ID: <1992Oct16.010439.27805@tybse1.uucp>

>  I see sales literature for Oracle's PRO*Ada only lists Verdix under the list
 
> of supported compilers.  Does it support any others?  An Oracle salesman 
> indicated that the compiler support might depend on the platform. In other 
> words, Oracle may only support Rational compilers on a Rational, but may 
> support Verdix and DEC Ada on a microvax.

I don't have a current product description in front of me, but PRO*Ada does
support other compilers.  Several years ago I used it quite a bit on a VMS
system with DEC Ada.

>   Since PRO*Ada is an Ada preprocessor, it should translate the embedded SQL
> into OCI (Oracle Call Interface) library calls.  Right?  So this should be
> standard Ada code compiliable by any Ada compiler.  If PRO*Ada only supports 
> Verdix, why?  Do they have stock in the company :->  Or more likely,  do
> different Ada compilers expect different object formats for their libraries
> and so a Verdix Ada library couldn't be linked by, say, DEC Ada.  Even it's
> on the same microvax.

If only things were so simple!! :-)  Then I would be able to combine the best
of multiple compilers.  I could mix the run-time of one with the optimization
of another!

The compilers that I have worked with certainly have different library 
structures.  I have yet to see an Ada compiler that is capable of utilizing
another vendors library manager.  Perhaps PCIS will make this less of an 
issue (I don't know a great deal about PCIS).  Object files can also be 
different.

When I was using PRO*Ada, I had a need to develop an application that was
able to run on multiple platforms and to be able to run stand-alone or to
talk to a remote database.  For almost all of the platforms that had to be 
supported, Oracle had a version of PRO*Ada that we could use.  The one 
platform that they did not support was the PC running MS-DOS.

To keep all of our application software source-code compatible between these
different platforms, we developed our own version of "PRO*Ada" that would
run on the PC.  We were able to make a preprocessor that was fully compatible
with Oracle's product...provided that the compiler we used supported 
pragma interface so that you could link to the OCI library.  At that time,
only one of the three PC-based Ada compiler vendors and a pragma interface
that actually worked.  

As a matter of fact, we couldn't resist the temptation to put additional 
functionality in our preprocessor.  Our preprocessor was able to do some
additional error checking that we found to be of great value during 
development!!  

If you would be interested, I would be happy to talk to you in much more
detail about this subject.

Regards,
Steve Case