From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,66383f4b94d281e6 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: Ada-95 Success Stories Date: 1996/05/24 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 156517190 references: <319a6322.2564997@news.cais.com> <4nv2ts$n8k@ns1.sw-eng.falls-church.va.us> <31a4eb29.1625999@news.cais.com> organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-05-24T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Mark said "OK, OK, so maybe I was too quick in asking for Ada-95 success stories. After reviewing the ACVC status for the various compilers from AdaIC, I gather no compiler is ready for heavy duty software development. Be that as it may, I'd really like to see early Ada-95 experiences from the trenches posted here. " Oh dear! More unwarranted reliance on validation. I don't know quite how you are drawing your conclusions from the validated compiler list, but there is no way from this list that you could tell whether or not a given compiler is "ready for heavy duty software development". In fact quite a bit of such development with Ada 95 is going on using GNAT, and I expect that other Ada 95 compilers, e.g. the Patriot 2 compiler, is also in serious use. In the case of GNAT, there are a number of successfully completed serious projects. But one thing is for sure -- you cannot judge from the validation state whether or not a compiler is usable. You can have non-validated compilers that are very much usable, and validated compilers that are completely unusable. To understand this, note the following two possibilities: A compiler that has been tweaked to get by the validation tests, and does indeed implement pretty much all of the language, but is still completely unreliable for large programs. A compiler that is highly reliable for large programs in practice, but lacks a couple of non-critical obscure features, not needed by these lare programs, but significant enough to shoot down a whole series of ACVC tests. The only way you can really tell whether a compiler is reliable for your particular application domain is to try it out!