Re: Ada & .Net (Rotor)

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

"Larry Kilgallen" <Kilgallen@SpamCop.net> wrote in message
news:iDK7+9+GKkgk@eisner.encompasserve.org...
>
> I realize too much effort has already been spent discussing
> the meaning of "Open Source", but to me it seems that source
> described as "Open" should work with any compiler that matches
> a language standard.
>
That might be a bit too stringent a requirement. Even though Ada is one of
the best and most portable standards around, it still allows for quite a bit
of implementation variance even within the things that are "standard". Throw
on top of that the implementation specifics of connecting to an OS or other
utilities and how that might vary between implementations and platforms and
I think you're just in a morass where anything but the most trivial
applications wouldn't qualify as "Open Source"


>
> So some popular software that happens to be Open Source today
> is hard to build on Windows.  Certainly that is an attribute of
> that particular software and not of Open Source.
>
One might allow for the fact that (probably) the largest body of "Open
Source" software is being built by folks in the Linux or other flavors of
Unix environments. Clearly those apps are going to have a big tendency to
depend on Unix. Not to "blame" anyone - but it does tend to cause problems
for Windows users who might want to utilize that software.

Of course, one answer is for more Windows users to produce open source
variants of these popular programs. Could that be an opportunity for Ada?
Identify a handful of Open Source products that work on Linux/Unix but not
on Windows & produce similar apps that would work on Windows? (Or both,
using something like GtkAda?)


> Without checking, I will presume for the sake of discussion that
> David Botton's COM software for Ada is Open Source.  Probably
> it is not hard to build on Windows.  Possibly it is quite
> hard to build (to the point of doing something useful) on Unix.

A reasonable observation and again something that points to a niche that Ada
could exploit within the Open Source world.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com