Re: Is the "Ada mandate" being reconsidered?

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

Joe said

"Gnu Ada95 is *very* young, both in years and in miles traveled, and I can
see no reason to be a pioneer here.  Pioneers collect arrows, die famous
but penniless.  For me, it's all risk and no benefit.  My military
customers feel the same way.  And, I must say that their ardor for Ada
seems to be cooling, even as their ardor for COTS grows."

Maybe not really as young as you think. First it uses the gcc backend,
so it benefits from the years and miles traveled by GNU C, and we have
very few problems with the code generator.

As far as the front end goes, almost all problems show up in an obvious
way, e.g. as an internally detected error, rather than as something
strange happening -- there are of course exceptions, but not many. GNAT has
been intensively used by many thousands of users, and it is shaking down
remarkably fast.

Certainly if your project is completely happy to live with Ada 83, and you
have adequate Ada 83 tools at hand with which you are familiar, then there
is certainly no need to rush into Ada 95.

However, a number of military customers are very interested in making the
move to Ada 95 soon, and have successfully done so. As I say, if here is
no reason to be a pioneer, then by all means don't pioneer, but if you
do march out on the Ada 95 trail, you may find GNAT a more grown up
companion that you expect!

Incidentally, one of the clear advantages of free software is precisely
that it DOES get widely used. This means that that the quantity and
variety of usage in the three years in which GNAT has been in active
use is MUCH more extensive than would have been achieved with a 
proprietary product in this same period, and that pattern can be
expected to persist. Although we cannot provide support to non-customers,
we do get lots of useful technical reports, and they all get looked at
eventually (we currently have about 3000 closed bug reports from the entire
history of GNAT development, and 100 open ones). The 3000 closed ones are
part of our regression suite, that now contains over 65 megabytes of Ada 95
code.