Re: IBM Acquires Rational Ada

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

Warren W. Gay VE3WWG <ve3wwg@cogeco.ca> wrote in message
news:3DF628C4.7090607@cogeco.ca...
>
> This is still a problem IMHO with Ada. I think the adapower site could
> be better organized and more complete in this regard. But I don't like
> to complain unless I can volunteer ;-)  Too much seems spread all over
> the net (and I am guilty of this myself).  What adapower cannot host,
> should perhaps have links to other Ada sites at least. I know that some
> of this is there, but it seems rather incomplete.
>
Well, its not just that its spread out over the net. Its that it is also
bits and pieces, none of which were designed to work together or look alike
or present a consistent, integrated programming environment to the
developer. If you need the pieces to work together, you typically are going
to have to make that happen yourself - and even then, it is going to look
like some cobbled-together, ecclectic collection of stuff and its never
going to be as slick and smooth and seamless as something that was designed
from the ground up to be a well integrated IDE.


>
> There needs to be more "general purpose" quality bindings written. Some
> of this is happening now that GNAT has been available, but like XFree86,
> this effort takes time. It may be a pipe dream, but I still believe
> in the possibility that we could see an Ada renaissance some day. As
> pyramids of software are written, at some point, people are going to
> start demanding that better quality foundations exist from which to
> start building.
>
It wouldn't hurt to have an Ada OS, but that's a really big project. If
there were a way to get some funding to build one, that might get the ball
rolling. After all, that's how Gnat got its start - and Gnat did a lot to
make Ada more popular by providing an accessible compiler for the masses.

Bindings, I'm not so sure about. That can get into tricky issues. But at
least a nice, big, juicy library of some general purpose code might start
offering lots of leverage. Containers at minimum. Probably some nice math
and statistics packages. Maybe some text processing facilities (like XML?)
All that sort of thing would be relatively straightforward to build and make
portable. A reference implementation that was agreed upon by most of the
vendors would do the trick and it would create lots of leverage for the
developer.


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Marin David Condic
I work for: http://www.belcan.com/
My project is: http://www.jast.mil/

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        --  Charles Montgomery Burns, [4F10]
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