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

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

Larry said

"That is where Standards come in.  If ObjectAda provides a
great development environment (the jury is still out, but
at least it doesn't think it is Unix).

As we explain to our potential customers, the issue of whether the
development environment looks like Unix is indeed a significant one
to many people *in both directions*, i.e. some people really do NOT
want a development environment that looks like Unix, but other people
really do.

The new NT GNAT version, based around the Cygnus tool set, indeed works
to make the development environment look very like Unix, so that for
example, Unix makefiles can be used without any change. Of course you
can still generate Windows applications which are not unixy in any way,
we are talking about the *development* environment here.

Larry is no friend of Unix :-) so he won't like that approach, but that's
fine, that's why we have more than one compiler on the market! What we
(ACT) are interested in doing is providing a full featured Ada 95 compiler
on windows NT (as with all supported versions of GNAT, we will support the
whole language, and our NT validation will be 100%, including annex D [no
other compiler has passed all the annex D tests yet for example]) that has
a development environment that makes it as easy as possible to move from
a unix based environment to an NT based envrironment, or to maintain
parallel development efforts on both Unix and NT. This is something that
a lot of people want.

But it is not for everyone ....