Re: Would you use Ada more if...

["Marin D. Condic" <not.valid@acm.org>]

One of the things that hurt Ada in the early days was the fact that for even
rather terrible compilers with no surrounding tools, you were being asked to
pay megabucks for the privilege of using them at all. This was happening
while people were able to get inexpensive Pascal compilers and those with
Unix got C free of charge. (Well, O.K., "bundled in with Unix" so whatever
you paid for the system included some payment for C. But the point was you
didn't have to go beg your boss to spend a hundred thousand for a compiler
and the custom hardware to run it on.)

Now, while Ada has certainly come down in cost to be competitive with other
languages, it still suffers in some respects for lack of nice integrated
toolsets all available in a shrink-wrap package on the shelf at CompUSA.
Things are getting better and more/better integrated toolsets are becoming
available or are in the works. You still won't see Ada standing next to the
C/C++/Java/Basic/etc. development kits on the shelves at computer stores. It
would be good for Ada to be there. If your plan is to work on producing more
or better integrated development tools for Ada, I'd say that was a noble
goal. It doesn't guarantee success, but these days, I think its the price of
admission for a language to be competitive.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com

Enabling Digital.
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"Juha Valimaki" <juha.valimaki@xdsloy.com> wrote in message
news:ajie5a$oqv$1@phys-news1.kolumbus.fi...
> hi,
>
> I have been looking for Ada tools for my one man company. There are many
Ada
> compilers/tools on the market each with their own strong and weak points,
> but I feel there would still be room for another tool set (probably from
> some already existing developer...).