From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: fd6dd,c78177ec2e61f4ac X-Google-Attributes: gidfd6dd,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,c78177ec2e61f4ac X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: ada and robots Date: 1997/06/14 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 248325997 References: <338CDA96.53EA@halcyon.com> <338F5D7D.6C03@tiac.net> <338F9D05.5EB3@bix.com> <5mqpj3$bc5$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> <33930245.12A1@sprintmail.com> <5mv984$7kn@news.emi.com> Organization: New York University Newsgroups: comp.robotics.misc,comp.lang.ada Date: 1997-06-14T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Joe said <> Note that you were responding *specifically* to a point about Ada 95. Since you are certainly not as far as I know a customer of ACT, you must be using other Ada 95 compilers (and more than one) to make such a judgment about the common solution (which certainly is not true of GNAT, and not true of at least some other Ada 95 compilers with which I am familiar). Can you please be more specific, or are you speaking from general (incorrect) hearsay without any real experience -- I guess the latter. As for the tools market, what makes you think the Ada and C tools markets are disjoint. Many tools that work for C work just fine for Ada (in an open systems context such as the approach GNAT uses, it would be surprising if it were otherwise). For example, it is perfectly possible to use a CM tool like Clearcase with GNAT. Yes, it is nice if a little bit of tailoring of these tools can be done. For example, Purify works pretty well with GNAT, and a fair number of our customers have used it successfully. However, it would work better if a little bit of specialization work were done. The Ada market may not be able to support the investmeent necessary for duplicating the production of tools like this, but it can and will support the investment for their specialization where this is worth while. Another example, GDB is a pretty competent multi-target multi-language debugger. Even in its completely Ada-unknowledgable form, it is usable with Ada 95 (usable enough that most of the developers on the GNAT project have never used anything else -- this is largely because of its very effective ability to call user level functions, so that debugging functions can be placed in the image). GDB is a large and complicated program, with a lot of complex target dependent stuff (e.g. it needs to know about stack formats). We certainly do not have the resources to duplicate this work. But we *do* have the resources to specialize GDB so that it knows more about Ada. The current Ada mode is a first step in that direction, but a lot more is coming in this direction. Similarly, a lot of work has been done on visual interfaces for GDB (there are several, including DDD, GDBTK, PMGDB, and a new one that we are creating from scratch). We could not afford to duplicate this entire collection, but it is highly desirable to have a choice, since personal tastes vary a lot in this area. We can afford to do a little Ada specialization (and it is interesting to note for example that the folks taking care of DDD, though certainly not Ada mainstream people, have on their own steam made some nice modifications to DDD to better accomodate Ada). Yes, Ada is a much smaller market than C++, so it is not worth while for tool makers to spend huge amounts of effort rebuilding their tools from scratch for Ada. It is however by no means a zero size market, so a number of tool makers are quite interested in capturing this incremental market if it means doing relatively small amounts of incremental work on their existing tools. This is what makes it practical for Ada 95 to develop and maintain a strong set of tools, even if and though Ada 95 remains a small market compared to C++ or Java or whatever language-du-jour is. Robert Dewar Ada Core Technologies.