Re: Compiling AFLEX 1.4a with Dec Ada 83 3.5-20 on Open VMS 7.1

["Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com>]

Yes. That was basically my impression. DEC/Ada83 vs Gnat/Ada95. I don't
remember if DEC was in the business of directly selling a Gnat distribution
with/without any specific support - but I do remember their sales weenies
indicating that this was the upgrade path from Ada83. I basically got the
public distribution and had our IT dude install it & it worked fine.

When DEC was assimilated I figured Compaq would continue support for
whatever DEC did while migrating towards other products, until the last
vestiges of DEC withered away and were consigned to the dustbin of history.
I figured that the Ada83 compiler would go along for the ride. (pity - it
was a really great compiler and one of the very first descent quality Ada
implementations.) However, the Gnat library model was really a better idea
as was Ada95, so I didn't shed too many tears over it. About the only
incompatibility I tripped across in porting the code I was responsible for
was a difference of opinion on how to implement discriminated records. It
was not hard to find or fix, so the port was mostly painless. It was a real
testimony to the portability of Ada - I had Ada code that worked on PC/NT,
Sun/Unix and Alpha/VMS and the porting between the three platforms was
pretty much just a recompile and go. (Except for systems where we hooked
heavily to OS services or file formats I can't recall anything that didn't
just recompile & run with no bugs introduced.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Larry Kilgallen" <Kilgallen@eisner.decus.org.nospam> wrote in message
news:A7+MNsS+DhZT@eisner.encompasserve.org...
> GNAT is officially recommended on VMS (Alpha only) by Compaq (nee DEC) for
> those who want Ada95.  It is not sold by Compaq, but they would be happy
to
> sell you one or more machines to run it on :-)
>