Re: Ada -vs- GNAT

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@bpr.best.vwh.net>]

On Sat, 25 May 2002 tmoran@acm.org wrote:
> > As for portability, you are not doing so badly
> > if you make something GNAT dependent,
>   I do think you should use your "Ada Core Technologies" signature when
> making a statement with such a clear financial impact.

I don't think so. You could replace the context with C and GCC instead of
Ada and GNAT, and I think it would still be true. He didn't say there are
no drawbacks, just that you aren't in a deep hole, like if you were
dependent on some fly by night commercial venture which goes belly up.

> > a much more limiting decision is to use packages that are tied to one
> > particular machine or proprietary operating systems.
>   I suppose there are small, specialized markets where that's true.

Pretty much the entire electronic design automation market meets your
definition of small and specialized. I imagine that similar engineering
intensive markets are also like that.

> For some programs, being tied to Windows is not a great limitation, however.

The kind of programs for which being tied solely to Windows is not a
great limitation probably don't benefit that much from Ada, since many
of the purported advantages of Ada, like standards conformance, and
relative machine independence, are not being utilized.

I guess that GNAT wins either way, since it runs on Windows and lots of
other OSes, and I can choose to adhere to the standard or not. :-)

-- Brian