Re: State of opinion of GNAT

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

Chris says

"  I think being a real 'fan' of GNAT probably also depends on
understanding and accepting the GNU ideal. Some people object to it, and
that's fine. If you are an Ada fanatic (which I am I suppose) and accept
the GNU movement's aims, then one cannot but be a fan of GNAT as well,
"

I don't think this is true at all. GNAT is simply a tool, you should use
it if and only if it meets your technical needs, and the price is right,
taking into account whatever support you might or might not need (presumably
if you don't need support, the price *is* right :-)

Yes, there may be some people who will use GNAT because it is free software
and the "GNU ideal" appeals, and there may be some people who will not use
it because this ideal does not appeal.

But for the great majority of people it makes more sense to simply regard
GNAT as a tool which may or may not meet your needs, using or not using GNAT
really has nothing to do with whether you understand and accept the GNU
ideology.

Yes, it is *because* of this idiology that the technology exists in 
its current freely available form, but from a users point of view you
can simply take advantage of this and that's that!

In practice, people will find that some combination of GNAT with proprietary
tools, packages, applications, interfaces, bindings etc and with free
such tools etc. will be what they need, and such a mixture is perfectly
reasonable and possible!

In some cases it will even make sense to combine the use of proprietary
Ada compilers with GNAT. FOr example, in the DEC VMS world, the Ada 95
compiler will be GNAT-based, but some DEC Alpha users may prefer to
stick with Unix for development purposes, even though eventual delivery
of the product is on VMS. Such users have two choices, they can either
use GNAT on DEC UNix, or they could use the Rational APex environment
on DEC Unix, and then use the export facility of Apex to export the
code for recompilation by GNAT.

The Ada 95 environment will hopefully get richer as time goes on with
the addition of both free and proprietary tools, bindings and compilers.
Ada 95 users will then have a choice of approaches, which seems attractive
from two points of view. First there is nothing like competitoin to sharpen
up everyone's techology, second if you have a choice of tools, then you are
more likely to find exactly what you need.