Re: ez2load helping Ada

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

Chris said

"  I have been spending some time handing out copies of the EZ2LOAD package
assembled by Prof Mike Feldman and co. I just want to say that, now this
version includes tasking, it is really starting to attract serious attention.
Ironically this GNAT port runnning on perhaps the worst operating of all the
ones it is ported to, is one of the most important. Important that is for
helping the spread of Ada into grass-roots/home computing. It gives Ada a
chance to win the hearts and minds of the young people who will be building the
big systems in the 21st century."

Actually I think the really important version of GNAT will be the
WIndows/95 version, since after all these days even the cheapest
computer you can buy comes with Win95 preinstalled. So now what we
need is a really slick installation package for the Win95 version
using a standard Win95 Wizard, and then hopefully we can incorporate
some of the nice environment stuff from EZ2LOAD. (This is one of the
reasons I am personally switching to Ada 95).

The DOS version will of course continue to have some considerable use
on obsolete machines, which will take a while to die out, although
I think that will happen faster than people think. The other day I
bought a brand new NEC machine with a 486 and 8 megs of memory and
a 2X CD ROM and a 170 meg hard drive for under $400. That machine would
be quite fine for running student programs under Win95 using GNAT.