Re: State of opinion of GNAT

[Larry Keeler <keeler@RDVAX.NTSC.NAVY.MIL>]

Sean McNeil <sean@MCNEIL.COM> wrote:

   "When I joined this newsgroup a few years ago, there was a lot of talk
    about GNAT and how it is just a toy compiler for the academic environment
    and couldn't be taken seriously.  After all, it doesn't even have a
    library manager!

    I have been working with GNAT for a while now and actually prefer it's
    environment.  Also, it is apparant that common opinion of GNAT's
    usefulness has completely turned around since those early days.  I
    was just wondering when (and how) these opinions were changed?"

I suspect that the when was about release GNAT 1.7 and the how was the large
volume of traffic on comp-lang-Ada about it by those willing to try the early
versions and the willingness and large amount of information about it which was
provided by Robert Dewer and others on the GNAT team at NYU.  (Of course the
fact that they made GNAT a really serious compiler helped a lot :-)
In addition, I think that the efforts by others outside of NYU also played an
important part, especially those of Michael Feldman, for his work with the DOS
version (and whoever it was that did the DJGPP part to make a DOS version even
possible), and to other members of Team Ada like David Weller who, like Mike
and Robert have contributed to making comp.lang.ada lively and informative. (A
certain cleric will be omitted. ;-)

Of course Tucker Taft and all of those responsible for Ada95 also had a part to.
(I cannot imagine a swell of respect developing for a BASIC compiler.)  But I
ramble.  (Although I don't suspect that you expected a concise answer.)

Larry
Team Ada