From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,84437ea0ce8ba3fe X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 1995-02-09 07:40:19 PST Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Path: nntp.gmd.de!newsserver.jvnc.net!news.cac.psu.edu!news.pop.psu.edu!hudson.lm.com!godot.cc.duq.edu!news.duke.edu!news.mathworks.com!news.bluesky.net!news.sprintlink.net!crash!telesoft!east.alsys.com!falis From: falis@east.alsys.com (Ed Falis) Subject: Re: All About ActivAda for Windows Message-ID: Sender: news@thomsoft.com Organization: Thomson Software Products, Burlington, MA, USA References: <3ham7m$nko@maverick.tad.eds.com> Date: Thu, 9 Feb 1995 15:40:19 GMT Date: 1995-02-09T15:40:19+00:00 List-Id: In hirasuna@acm.org (Michael Hirasuna) writes: >In article <3ham7m$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)