Re: Only one Ada vendor?

[Colossus.Pike@worldnet.att.net (anon)]

Note: The ISO consider Ada 2007 specification (Adopted Jan 2007) to 
      be an "Ada 95 Amendments 1" only. But It is still "Ada 95" as
      the parent specification. 

There are many reason that you can say "One Ada vendor" and that is 
GNAT. Any one can take a few movements come up with a lot of reasons 
and most of those will be true in one respect or another.

But to start with is that GNAT is to most not a true Ada compiler.  It is 
an "Experimental" and "Educational" Ada compiler only.  Adacore has not 
tried to make it a standard compiler. The reason people say this is that 
before the 2005 specification were adopted in Jan. 2007, Adacore had 
pre-released a compiler that had most if not all of the 2005 features in 
2004 and though 2006. This alone make the GNAT compiler "Experimental".  
Also, no standard Ada or other language compiler would allow obsolete 
features to exist in the current version. No matter what! They would have 
two compilers one with the old standard or outdate features and the second 
current standard only. An example of this is "pragma No_Run_Time" which 
is not a standard Ada pragma or a current feature listed in the GNAT 
manual. It is listed in the obsolete section of the GNAT manual, but 
it still work.  

Also business like standards and those who abide by those standards. 
Adacore with pre-releases of Ada specification does not meet the business 
needs for those standards. Then with Adacore also saying they are the 
leader in Ada, that scare off outside business from using Ada. The 
price tag of $14_000 per year for GNAT PRO hurts as well. Most Ada 
compilers are less than 10% of that with a 30 to 90 day free support 
included. With extended yearly support optional to buy if and when 
needed.  And for their own reasons businesses prefer to buy software 
instead on downloading for free. 

In both of the previous two reason Adacore has done more to "KILL" the 
Ada language than promote it.

The other companies like Janus or Green-Hills have not adopted the Ada 
2005.  On one of their product web pages it states that they would not 
follow GNAT and create a first Amendments to Ada 95 compiler, they will 
wait until a true and complete specification was adopted. In other 
words a specification that was not controlled by GNAT.

Then there the supply and demand reason.  Since there is little demand 
for Ada the companies will would prefer to use their resources on 
other languages that are in demand.

Then there is the anti-government reason.  To most people Ada is 
still tied to US government (direct link stopped in 1998). So, if 
you hate the US government you do not use Ada. In the world, this 
is a "BIG ONE"!


Some have said that other vendors are starting to make updates. Well 
I will believe it when they have the product available until then 
there is only one Ada vendor for Ada 2007.

As for Ada 95 its has drop a few but they are still around 40+ vendors.

I was not going to reply to this post but with a couple of people cutting 
me down again. I said what the hell!


In <1192806306.892546.73350@q5g2000prf.googlegroups.com>,  Sloan.Kohler@gmail.com writes:
>Its Friday - thought I would try to stir things up...
>
>Several people have stated that "Ada" refers to the latest approved
>version (i.e., Ada => "Ada 2005").  Its been well over a year since
>AdaCore announced Ada 2005 support started shipping a pretty complete
>implementation.  As far as I know, no other vendor has yet announced
>any intention to support the current standard.  Maybe they're working
>on it in secrecy. Maybe they are waiting on customer demand.  Maybe
>they have already lost most of their customers to AdaCore and simply
>don't care anymore.
>
>Whatever the case, I'm concerned that the number of viable Ada vendors
>seems to be shrinking. The benefits of language standardization are
>greatly diminished if only one vendor bothers to support the standard.
>
>I have no relationship to AdaCore other than being a supported
>customer who is very happy with their support and their business model
>(i.e. they sell support, not license keys).  Their "build it and they
>will come" approach to product development and attracting customers
>seems to work well.
>
>I'm aware that Aonix and DDC-I have had some recent Ada related
>product announcements. That's a good thing but still no public
>indication that they're working on Ada 2005 support. At least its
>still possible to find Ada products featured on the Aonix, DDC-I, and
>Green Hills web pages.
>
>I'm upset/disappointed by what IBM has done to Apex since taking over
>Rational several years ago. Apex was (& still is) an excellent, full
>featured (though costly) Ada development environment.  Since IBM took
>over it seems that Apex product development has completely stagnated
>while they focus on collecting license maintenance fees from legacy
>customers who are in too deep to switch compilers.  They also allowed
>the same thing to happen with ClearCase - ClearCase users are
>switching to Subversion for configuration management. Its not nearly
>as capable as ClearCase but its good enough and can be deployed
>without buying licenses.   If Apex and ClearCase were marketed with an
>open-source, support focused business model (instead of a license fee
>focused business model) I'm convinced they would have a lot more
>success in the market.
>
>So we need to have more than one Ada vendor to keep Ada viable but I
>don't have hope that anyone else can effectively compete with AdaCore
>unless they adopt a similar business model.
>
>-- Sloan
>