Re: What happens to DEC Ada?

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@acm.org>]

Well, 20,000 files certainly qualifies in my mind as "pretty large". That's
an unusual sized project - I'll bet that of all the Ada projects in all the
world, that may rank in say the top 5%? It certainly isn't center of the
bell curve.

Obviously in a case like that, minimizing recompilation is a noble goal.
However, I'd suspect that there are cases where it takes more time to try to
reduce the number further than to simply take the hit & recompile. Once
you've gone to the effort of scanning the file to determine if it *really*
needs to be recompiled, you probably should just go ahead and recompile it.
(Maybe a smart editor and a project database could spread the load to
edit-time rather than compile-time? But that would start me haranguing on
how wonderful it would be for Ada to have a really spiffy IDE with
seamlessly integrated tools, etc. :-)

And of course usually the less expensive option is to apply faster hardware.
Depends on the environment you work in. I once worked for a defense
contractor in New Jersey that did lots of cost-plus projects. Engineers
spent huge amounts of time in line waiting to xerox stuff because there was
only one available xerox machine. "Buy More" seems the obvious answer.
However, an engineer's time on a cost-plus contract was making money. A
xerox machine was a capital expenditure that couldn't be billed back
entirely to the government. So I could imagine situations in which it would
be more profitable to make the engineers wait for massive recompiles - or
laboriously figure it out by longhand. :-)

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/


"Wes Groleau" <wwgrol@sparc01.ftw.rsc.raytheon.com> wrote in message
news:3B6B04F0.63E9602B@sparc01.ftw.rsc.raytheon.com...
>
> We have about 20,000 Ada files, many of them VERY large,
> and if ALL are obsolete (forced to be), we can code all
> in ten hours on ONE processor with Apex.  Faster with
> GNAT.  When only a few hundred are obsolete, Apex takes
> longer to figure out which ones than it does to actually
> compiler them.
>
> --
> Wes Groleau
> http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~wgroleau