Re: Ada -vs- GNAT

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

There's nothing wrong with being compiler or platform dependent. It depends
on the project at hand. Many projects are sufficiently limited in scope that
there is no reason to go to extreme efforts to avoid compiler or platform
dependencies if doing so causes you to lose development leverage. (One
should always isolate this and document it as best as is possible so as to
maximize the ability ro reuse large chunks of the app, but if you get a lot
of leverage with some non-portable package, this is a good thing.)

Looking at the packages you reference, one could imagine the functionality
being the sort of thing that would be generally useful and good candidates
for some kind of more general compiler/platform independent specification.
I'd hope that Ada0x would add this leverage to the language in some manner
that means developers don't have to accept a vendor-specific solution in
order to gain the leverage.

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


"Pascal Obry" <p.obry@wanadoo.fr> wrote in message
news:u3cwgadbo.fsf@wanadoo.fr...
>
> I agree with your point. But since many libraries are missing from the Ada
> standard it is hard to not do so. This was one goal for AWS (not using
> compiler specific packages)... But it would have been too much work to
> implement an equivalent for GNAT.Regexp, GNAT.Regpat, GNAT.Table,
> GNAT.Directory_Operations and GNAT.Calendar.Time_IO...
>
> Maybe this will change with the next Ada revision, but I don't think most
> hobbyist have the resources to buy all Ada compilers around and spend time
to
> check wether the program works with all compilers or to build all kind of
> helper libraries, you want to concentrate your effort on the main problem
(for
> AWS it was on the Web framework) especially since free time is quite
> expensive ;) And yes in this context GNAT is the compiler of choice...
> Building Open Source software with an Open Source compiler.
>