Re: Overriding discriminants perplexes GNAT 3.14p

[Dmitry A.Kazakov <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

Stephen Leake wrote:

> Dmitry A.Kazakov <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> writes:
> 
>> Stephen Leake wrote:
>> > You are making a couple of assumptions that I find dubious.
>> > 
>> > 1) More and cheaper customers = higher quality
>> > 
>> > I don't believe this, because the first consequence of more cheaper
>> > customers is to spread your support personnel thinner, so they have
>> > less time to write quality fixes for the bugs that get reported.
>> 
>> Consider personal PC's today and mainframes of 60's. In a long term
>> perspective cheaper products bring higher quality. This could be [and
>> usualy is] undesirable from the point of view of a product vendor. Well,
>> this is how they try to resist to, let's say, progress and then disapper.
> 
> That's only true when there are economies of scale. Intel can make
> millions of identical Pentiums, and make a profit. ACT cannot make
> millions of identical support responses.

I suppose that when a bug has been corrected, it is out forever. (:-))

Nobody expects a premium support for a product for ~1K. It could be just 
new patches and a very formalized procedure of submitting bug reports per 
E-mail. Not much more, than any computer game usually have.

> Remember, their business is
> support to people, each of whom has unique needs.

I also remember DEC's - "we don't sell computers, we sell solutions". 
Sounds similar, but where is DEC now? People, plebs, if you want, cannot 
afford this support. But they still have to be served. And if no Ada 
compiler vendor does it, then well, this place will be occupied by someone 
else.

>> > 2) ACT customers do not require all strengths of Ada.
>> > 
>> > GNAT is the only compiler to support _all_ of the Ada Annexes. ACT
>> > only supports code that customers demand.
>> 
>> So they dropped JGNAT. Could this happen if GNAT were widely used in web
>> applications?
> 
> Yes. It just means the JVM is not an appropriate target for web
> applications. I don't do web stuff myself, but my understanding is
> that the Java hype for this application is just that; hype.

This is no matter. Is Windows an appropriate OS? Is Pentium a good CPU. Is 
C++ is a decent language? They are just good enough to make money. Do you 
really believe that people will stop making money with JVM, should they 
once wake up and discover that JVM is bad? There is demand and it will be 
satisfied this or that way. Yes, Ada could provide a better plaform than 
JVM, but to do it, one should first get into this business. And if you are 
not Microsoft you must support JVM for some lenghty period of time. And 
this is just the first very short step along a very long road.

> The question was not "is Ada good for web applications" but "do ACT
> customers use all of Ada".

If they do it, then why there are still bugs in the compiler? My point is 
that should GNAT be really widely used for multimedia, web, computer 
gaming, embedded, banking then it would have much less bugs.

>> > So I have to believe that there is at least one ACT customers
>> > using each part of Ada. Which also helps defeat assumption 1).
>> 
>> I hope so. But you should admit that a wider use of GNAT would make it
>> better.
> 
> Well, that is precisely what I am not admitting :). Paying good people
> to write good code, and getting high-quality feedback from serious
> users, is an excellent model for producing a quality product. That
> does _not_ mean you have to have "a lot" of customers; just "enough"
> customers.

I cannot resist to remind you how DEC's boss claimed that nobody would need 
to have a personal computer at home.

> MS Windows has way more users than GNAT; is it better? How about MS
> VC++?

MS ignores users because it is a monopoly which has too many of them.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry Kazakov
www.dmitry-kazakov.de