Re: Floating point emulation

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

Michael asks

<<Is this an arbitrary restriction by an ivory tower? Or have you
costed out the cost of upgrading the chip to have a floating point
unit versus the cost of emulating floating point in software?>>

It is just something we (a) don't support and (b) none of our customers
have needed. Last I knew, ivory tower was not the usual phrase that people
use for the principle that you do what your customers are willing to pay for!

As I said in an earlier post, it is probably not that difficult a problem
to solve (get DOS and GNAT working with floating-point emulation), we have
invested zero effort in trying to solve this problem, because there is
zero demand. Well that's not quite fair, there are a couple of users with
educational licenses who would like it (notably Mike Feldman), but that's
not enough for us to justify working on it.

One of the changes that happened in the GNAT project when it moved from
being directly supported by the DoD to being commercially supported is that
the choices on such matters have to get far harder nosed. We have little
choice but to work on things that people will pay for. 

It would be nice if there were some general free support for educational
users, or if we could afford to provide this kind of free support. There
isn't, and we can't (at least not yet).

The one thing that we DO contribute on our own nickel is the continued
work to make public versions of GNAT in binary form for various targets.
Often people think that the GPL somehow mysteriously requires this kind
of effort -- it definitely does not! But as part of our contribution to
helping to spread Ada 95 use, particularly in universities, we think this
is a worthwhile effort, and will continue to spend our time doing it.

A lot of folks, particularly in universities, would like free support, and
that is understandable (sometimes people rant and rave, complete with
obscenities, *demanding* that we provide free support, and that is not
understandable :-) As i say, it would be nice if we could afford to provide
such support free, or if someone could fund it, but right now that's not
the way things are, and we are super busy.

Especially this week, preparing for four more 100% validatoins of GNAT for
four new targets that are just about to begin (the validators arrive from
Germany on Monday :-)

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies