Re: Grace and Maps (was Re: Development process in the Ada community)

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

Milton Freidman is walking down the street with his wife. She says "Honey,
there's a $20 bill lying on the sidewalk." Milton replies "You must be
mistaken dear. If there was a $20 bill on the pavement the market would have
picked it up a long time ago..." :-)

Yes, database access has been around for a long time. Are you sure there's
never been a compiler that shipped with a database at the same time? And met
with some market success? I don't know, but I'd suspect there were probably
some that had at least fairly primitive databases sold with them. I know if
I got one that just came along with the compiler, I'd make use of it -
especially if there was no effort to get it working as might be the case if
I wanted to do something like, say, interface to Oracle.

Maybe if Ada had a "conventional" interface to a database & possibly if
compilers included a usable database (maybe not with every feature possible,
but useful for something more than trivial projects) that fit that
interface, it would be something the market might take notice of. Especially
if the pitch was "You can get it to work on a dozen different
machines/compilers without changing a line of your application..." Its a big
"maybe" but sometimes it pays to float ideas and see what comes up.

Perhaps GNADE attempts to address this need and it might do so fairly well.
I don't know, not being in the database business for quite some time and
never having taken a look at GNADE. (I used to interface Ada to RDB via an
SQL precompiler a very long time ago in a galaxy far, far, away.) My biggest
objection would be that it is not (at present) part of "Conventional Ada"
and it might be tied to a specific compiler at this time. However, if it was
proposed as being "The Answer" and accepted as such, it might help add
leverage to Ada, making Ada a more attractive solution. A rising Ada tide
lifts all boats. If Ada is going to gain market share, it needs to offer
*more* leverage to the developer than other languages and a DBMS of some
sort sounds like "more" to me. Other ideas? :-)

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


"Stephen Leake" <stephen.a.leake.1@gsfc.nasa.gov> wrote in message
news:uelgxqf79.fsf@gsfc.nasa.gov...
>
> Then the market must not want one. Database access has been around a
> _long_ time, and is a _huge_ market!
>