Re: All About ActivAda for Windows

[falis@east.alsys.com (Ed Falis)]

In <hirasuna-0802951859580001@hirasuna.clark.net> hirasuna@acm.org (Michael Hirasuna) writes:

>In article <3ham7m$nko@maverick.tad.eds.com>, PLSBSS01.jdusek@eds.com wrote:
>> 
>> When will this product be available and how much will it cost?

>I got my copy (ver. 5.1.3) about four months ago. I paid about $1000.

>The project I hoped to used it on was cancelled, so I don't have too much
>experience with it. But there are at least two potential "got-yas"

>1) The documentation seems to say that a floating-point coprocessor is
>absolutely necessary for execution if any floating point operations are
>used.

>2) The way the libraries are configured, it seems that Ada tasking is not
>possible when using WIN32 calls.

>I sent E-mail to Alsys to get a clarification of these concerns, but I got
>no straight answers. Maybe someone from Alsys can answer these concern by
>replying to this thread.

>-- 
>Michael Hirasuna    |  hirasuna@acm.org


Here's as straight a poop as I can manage:

Price is $995, plus $295 first year maintenance (optional).  Substantial 
discounts are available to students and educational institutions.

1.  WRT floating point support, there are two cases: a) for appplications 
generated to execute under DOS, we supply our own FP emulation package for
execution of the application on a machine w/o hardware fp.  This emulation
package has some additional "nice" features like coprocessor stack overflow
handling through extension of the stack in memory.  This is quite useful for
complex expressions.  b) for applications generated to execute under the 
Win32S API (ie Windows 3.1), the WIN32s fp emulation supplied by Microsoft is
used.  As far as we have been able to determine, it does not support the
coprocessor stack extension, and there may be other incompatibilities, where
the emulation sw does not behave in the same way as the coprocessor, in areas
that are important to the Ada runtime's expectation for handling coprocessor-
generated exceptions.  The Release Notes for our product warn about this
potential incompatibility, and recommend use of a coprocessor (or 486 with
integrated FP support).  So, the bottom line is you can execute these
applications w/o fp hardware, but caveat emptor.

2. Tasking is not supported for this product, because it's very difficult to
implement delays and preemptive scheduling under Windows 3.1, given its lack of
both interrupts and threads.  Discussions with users led us to the conclusion
that lack of tasking was not serious for the kinds of applications they were
developing under Windows 3.1.  We also offer a Windows-NT product, which does
support tasking (mapped to OS threads) for NT.  In the latter case, this 
becomes important for the development of server type applications.


Hope this answers your concerns.

- Ed Falis, Thomson SW Products (nee Alsys)