Re: More Uniform Ada libraries (was: Proving Correctness)

["nicolas" <n.brunot@cadwin.com>]

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"Stephen Leake" <stephen.a.leake.1@gsfc.nasa.gov> a �crit dans le message
news: u66byfd4u.fsf@gsfc.nasa.gov...
> "nicolas" <n.brunot@cadwin.com> writes:
>
> > Shortly said :
> > - We need Ada compilers suitable for us
>
> Which you appear to have today. You have given no reason to suggest
> that might change in the future.

Alsys Ada83 is excellent, but is now somewhat out of date (about 6 years
old), will it run for WinXP ?
We never had any need of support in 6 years, but it's no longer supported
nor evolving,
It will have to be replaced someday, at least to take full advantage of
Ada95 features.

Aonix Objectada is excellent for us, except that link time is far too long
for our applications and cannot be used today for dayly development
When the link time is 12mns instead of 20s, and has to be done 10 or 20
times a day, it is a problem.
Will Aonix go on with Ada ? some have doubts

Rational Apex is not bad, but still have some little problems
Will they go on with Ada ? some have doubts too

Gnat (professional or public version) is too far from being suitable for us

So compiler availibility could become critical sooner than you think

> > - We will have them only if the number of Ada users with our
> > concerns is high enough.
>
> Apparently it is today; why will it change for the worse? The trend is
> toward more Ada use, not less.

From we hear on comp.lang.ada the number of people having our concerns is
everything but high enough ...
The trends towards Ada use depends of who you listen and what kind of
application you develop.

> > <snip> We are used to develop our own Ada
> > libraries At the very beginning we worked on graphical applications
> > for DOS platform and almost no Ada library was available for our
> > needs. Now, when we need external libraries, we usually buy C
> > commercial libraries and import them in Ada. The reason is that the
> > libraries we need simply don't exist in Ada, while excellent ones
> > are available in C.
>
> Great! I'll assume they will continue to be avialable, independent of
> the Ada market.

They have been for years and continuously improving.
We have absolutely no reason to worry about that.
If only we had the same situation for Ada compilers, we would have nothing
to worry about.

> > As far as we are concerned, we don't really need the kind of Ada
> > standard libraries we are talking about.
>
> Then why are we talking about them!?

Have you read my post ?

> I don't see how you reach this conclusion from the above statements;
> you've said nothing about why the Ada compilers you actually use, or
> the features they provide, might disappear.

Now that's done :-)

> I also don't see how this relates to "standard Ada libraries". You are
> _not_ using Ada libraries; you are using the _standard_ mechanisms in
> Ada to import available C libraries. Sounds like a good situation to
> me!

Have you really read the post entirely ?