Re: Ada Core Technologies and Ada95 Standards

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

Ken notes/asks:
I read that Ada Core Technologies is taking over the GNAT project.
There is also talk of GNAT V3.04 becoming available on all platforms.
For the latest news check: http://www.gnat.com and
ftp://ftp.cs.nyu.edu/pub/gnat.

  Version 3.04 is already avaiable for our customers, and we expect public
  binary releases to be made available soon. As for all platforms, I don't
  know quite what that might mean, after all GCC supports a couple of hundred
  platforms, and we don't have GNAT on all of them yet :-) However, there
  are over 20 GNAT ports now, with more appearing!

By the way, talking about a validated or standardized Ada95 compiler.
I think it is smart to have a baseline standard that all compilers
should meet. Basically, the baseline standard would reflect that all
compilers must comply to MIL-STD or whatever (like ANSI V2.5/3.0 of
C++). That way, anything you pick up at the bookstore on Ada95 on
BASIC/ADVANCED ADA95 programming - will compile and work as long as
you stay away from platform specific libraries (GNAT-Ada95 or GCC
works off this principle). I don't think this is too much to ask of
any vendor (since the specs came out in Feb. 95). Without some sort
of baseline standard, it is very hard to call a programming language
**PORTABLE** in cross platforming world.

  Here things are in much better shape than you are aware of. There is
  and will be no MIL-STD for Ada 95, but, unike the situation with C++
  which is not standardized yet, there is both an ISO and ANSI standard
  for Ada 95 (the 95 refers to the year of standardization, and it was
  early in 95 (we also made 94) that the standard was approved).

  There is also a well funded effort to create a comprehensive test suite
  which will be used as a basis for formal validation under the auspices
  of NIST. An initial version of this suite is already available, and
  has been used to validate several Ada 95 compilers, including GNAT.