Re: [Q] GNAT Success stories?

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

<<That's right. I don't know how to configure programs like News or Gnat
and I don't know their versions either. I let it do my labor ingenieur.
I can only hope he does a good work.
My student have been working with GNAT (whatever version it is),
so there must be an assembler with.
Nevertheless the labor ingenieur must resign before messages like
"internal error".>>

The requirement for installing GNAT is simple in theory: read and follow
all the installation instructions precisely and exactly.

In practice, these days, especially in the NT world, people inherit an
attitude from the Mac world that software should install itself easily,
and you should not have to worry about reading anything or being precise.
Certainly that's the way *I* install most Win95 software today.

GNAT is not a turnkey installation on Win 95, there are some details that
you have to pay careful attention to, and although the great majority of
people manage to install it without trouble (e.g. several of my freshmen
last semester installed it just fine without any help), some people do
run into trouble.

So far, it is has not been a major design goal to make the installation
of GNAT NT idiot-proof (and no, I am not saying you are an idiot if you
make a mistake -- I am just using a common term that very nicely captures
a desirable goal -- the idea behind that idiom is that if even an idiot
can install it, then you have truly reached the goal of simple installation).

Our primary NT goal is to support serious development, particularly in the
case of moving large scale Unix programs to NT. Consequently the focus has
been on solving functionality problems (like the nasty ld problem, which
generally hits ONLY large programs -- and which finally appears to be solved)

We have *not* partiularly conentrated on easy installation, since that is
not a priority for our customers. 

It sure would be nice to have NT/GNAT install as easily as possible, and
we will continue to work on this in a low priority mode. As you will
probably know, Mike Feldman proposed a couple of years ago to do some
development to make GNAT on NT and the Mac really super easy to use, but
no one was interested in funding this. Instead the funding went to
Academic Ada, which means that you have a choice, and given the amount
of that funding, I would assume (though don't know first hand, because
I personally run OS/2 :-) that Object Ada should be super easy to install,
since clearly it is a priority goal for that project.

It may well be that for simple student use, GNAT is not the ideal choice,
although it does have very good error messages for student use, and that
alone has caused it to be the teaching vehicle of choice at many places,
even in some military academies, where other compilers could have been
used at no charge.

P.S. regarding the "nasty ld problem", we will probably prepare an update
of the 3.09 release that fixes this and make this available in the near
future. Not many people run into this, but if you do it can be a 
significant annoyance ...

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies