Re: Ada & .Net (Rotor)

[Ingo Marks <adv@region-nord.de>]

Juergen Pfeifer wrote:

> ...
> Java is a programming language for the Internet, but .NET is much more: 
> ...

It's nice (for Microsoft) that you advertise .NET for them. But this is an 
Ada newsgroup and some of us are just interested in having Ada support for 
.NET. AFAIK no vendor plans to do this so .NET isn't attractive for Ada 
developers. Maybe someday someone starts a Ada.NET project - I don't know. 
I have read a document from MS Research mentioning that it would 
theoretically be possible to have Ada support for .NET. Currently Java 
support for Ada is much more interesting because there exists a working Ada 
frontend producing Java Bytecode. The DotGNU project (competitional 
framework to .NET) plans to support Java Bytecode so this framework is also 
more interesting than .NET (at least for me).

> You should not identify .NET with C#. .NET is really language agnostic and
> the intermediate language (the "bytecode") is designed from the beginning
> to support that (for example there is a concept of references in the
> machine model which makes it very easy to have procedures with out params;
> try this with JVM). Most of the power is really in the virtual execution
> engine, the virtual object model and the class libraries.

This may be true. But it doesn't help us as long there is no Ada compiler 
for .NET. For myself, I don't want to switch to .NET and write all my 
applications for .NET only but just to have the _option_ to code in Ada 
when I need to write .NET applications.

> ... provide an iinternet standards
> based platform and a component and programming model that makes it very
> easy to write services and apps for the platform.

The last sentence you should have written this way:

> easy to write services and apps for the _Windows_ platform.

I know that MS eagerly tries to convince developers to .NET and asserts 
that .NET would be a platform independent framework. But

a) Steve Ballmer himself has emphasized at CeBit 2002 in Hannover that MS 
will hinder every competition to the .NET framework by using its patents. 
MS allows competitional frameworks (like Mono) just for "academical 
research".

b) From experience I know: When MS says "platforms" they always mean 
Windows platforms only.

c) Many companies are not interested in .NET because they already use Java 
and/or they don't agree with the new license politics of Microsoft which 
forces them to follow every update. And some companies are neither 
interested in Java/J2EE nor in .NET because they want to keep their 
knowledge secret and know that there exist pretty good decompilers 
revealing their knowledge ;-)

.NET is a nice framework but suitable for Windows developers only. I think 
it is not wise to be dependent from one vendor only. I like Ada because its 
standards are really platform independent. There are (even free) compilers 
out there for many platforms and this makes porting applications between 
platforms really possible.

Ada just needs some standardization and some more good libraries. Then ... 
who knows? Why should it not become a new (little ;-) competitor to the 
Java and .NET frameworks? This would be good for everyone because we all 
know that competition betters quality.