Re: Ada compilers supporting Ada 2005 (was: Blocking syscalls in Tasks)

[Colin Paul Gloster <Colin_Paul_Gloster@ACM.org>]

On Tue, 7 Oct 2008, Britt Snodgrass wrote:

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|"[..]                                                                 |
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|I'm interested to know which vendors are serious about supporting the |
|standard."                                                            |
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I think it is clear that RRSoftware is serious about this, even if it
does not have a suitable product available yet. Similarly for Irvine,
judging from answers to queries I asked in Summer 2008.

Sofcheck also seems to be serious but paying clients have been
demanding other things instead of Ada 2005. Of course, if you wish to
pay for it...

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|"[..]                                                                 |
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|> Is a genuine Ada 2005 compiler available from Ada Core Technologies?|
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|What do you mean by "genuine"?"                                       |
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It would need to comply with the standard, and as such bugs would not be
permitted.

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|" AdaCore has been far, far more                                      |
|proactive with Ada 2005 support [..]"                                 |
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True.

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|  Rational                                                            |
|Apex used to be a great product, but IBM has let it atrophy, making   |
|absolutely no effort to be competitive or market it to new customers. |
|From what I've observed, they care nothing about customer retention   |
|for Apex and ClearCase.                                               |
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|[..]                                                                  |
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|[..]  But unless                                                      |
|IBM changes their business model for Apex, its will come too late to  |
|be competitive."                                                      |
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I was told by IBM in 2008 that because Apex is not available alone by
itself that I would need to acquire many other items - none of which I
need, such as a compiler for another language and a different version
tracking system than what many people I collaborate with already use -
from IBM for a lot more money than from some of the other compiler
writers. Unless code compiled by Apex performs spectacularly better
than other compilers which I shall be evaluating in the near future,
then it may be difficult to make a compelling case to acquire Apex. I
would prefer to have more compilers than fewer compilers, but it may
be difficult to acquire every one.