Re: Ada means what version by default ?

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Kevin says:            

"I'd agree there.  Robert D. is in a bit of a special position w.r.t.
Ada95; most Ada use out there is Ada83 (by a very long way).  And that
will probably continue to be the case for a good few years yet, given the
duration of a typical Ada project and the availability (or lack) of tried,
tested and trusted compilers."

Hmm! this reflects a view that Ada is only used on giant projects. More and
more a typical Ada project is a couple of hundred lines long, if that,
written by a student for some project. 

It would be interesting to know how many professional Ada programmers
there are in the world working on big projects. 

We estimate that between 5,000 and 10,000 people have downloaded GNAT
from us and various mirror sites. And of course, when students are using
the compiler, they don't download it individually, furthermore we have
no way of including the number of people who get it off CD ROM's etc.

How do you want to do the comparison?

if you allow only big DoD projects in the comparison, no doubt Kevin
is right, but if you count all programmers who have written in Ada,
or even count lines of code, the switch over may be faster than you
think (students churn out lots of code pretty fast :-)