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From: eachus@spectre.mitre.org (Robert I. Eachus)
Subject: Re: Ada means what version by default ?
Date: 1995/04/07
Message-ID: <EACHUS.95Apr7183328@spectre.mitre.org>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 100070419
references: <3ksv4s$f9e@news.uni-c.dk> <1995Mar28.115614.9511@eisner>
organization: The Mitre Corp., Bedford, MA.
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1995-04-07T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

In article <ichbiah.280.2F856EEB@jdi.tiac.net> ichbiah@jdi.tiac.net (Jean D. Ichbiah) writes:

  > The cost of the compiler is but the tip of the iceberg: if you are
  > running a project of a million line or so, you are likely to have
  > baselined your compiler and the cost of changing (and confronting
  > 95 incompatibilities) could very well be several order of
  > magnitude higher than the compiler costs.

    Could be, but the evidence so far is that the differences between
compilers are more likely to cause problems, and that has not been a
major problem in Ada.  In many cases moving to 9X has been compile,
rerun tests, and go.  (But first you must get to the point where your
major problem is not compiler bugs in the 9X compiler.)

  > For example, the fact that a given target may be used for your
  > project, have a decent Ada compiler, but be insufficiently present
  > on the market to entice any vendor to supply a 95 compiler.

    This is turning out to be the major issue, but it is cutting both
ways.  For a few hardware architectures, most notably the 68K family,
staying with 83 seems currently to be the prudent choice.  With many
other architectures, such as the Power PC, Ada 95 compilers seem to be
more mature today...

    (Flame retardant: Just so I don't get overly toasted, I'm not just
talking general software development, but in particular embedded
systems.  Compiler, toolset, chapter 13, existing bindings, and long
term support are all important, and two projects with the same target
can and will reach different conclusions.)

--

					Robert I. Eachus

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