Re: Is Ada a commercial language ? (was: SEIC News Brief...)

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

Larry says

"Commercial acceptance requires a competitive cost-per-seat figure."

  That is not clear at all. For example Focus and similar 4GL systems are
  FAR more expensive than COBOL development systems on a cost per seat
  basis, often by a factor of 10. Statements like the above are often
  made as though they are tautological truths, but they are not!

Larry says

"I note with interest that the ACT GNAT web pages indicate the
 forthcoming Alpha (only) VMS port requires VMS V7.0.  Although
 I use it as a developer, I have never heard of anyone using VMS
 V7.0 (yet) in production.  I know a large C-shop using VMS V5.4A
 on a cluster of 9 VAX systems for development."

  There are two separate issues here which are a little mixed up. First,
  is there really a market for a VMS port for VAX. It would not take much
  of a market to make it worth our while, but it is not clear that even
  this small market exists. So far, of the possibly VAX interested
  customers, none has been sure of whether they would be interested.
  Some VAX projects are base lined on Ada 83 anyway, and there is no
  point in changing. Others are planning on moving to Alphas soon anyway.
  If there is a sufficient customer base to support VAX/VMS, it is certainly
  a technical possibility

  The other issue is VMS 7.0 on the Alpha. Actually, we have had more
  trouble with not (yet) supporting 7.1, than with users who are not
  planning to switch to 7.x yet. There are good technical reasons for
  not choosing 6.3, since getting the tasking to work on 6.3 would be
  very much harder, due to the less developed state of the threads
  libraries.

  The users who have been interested in this product are generally planning
  to use 7.x for future production (which is what is interesting for a future
  product not yet released!)

  It would certainly be possible to generate a limited capability 6.3
  release if there are interested customers. As always we find we are
  more interested in messages that say "if you had x, we would use it",
  or "we need x, please do it", than the style of messages which say
  "I am sure that if you did x (which I would like to have free), I
  am sure others would buy it" :-)

P.S. we are planning an Alpha/NT release of GNAT, but so far we do not
have firm plans for PowerPC/NT, since we have had no customer interest
in that port.

A status report on the VMS port incidentally is that it is about to go
into field test phase two in a week or two, so the product release
is probably a couple of months off (we plan a full 2.0.1 validation
first).