Re: Packing Record Structures in Ada

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

Michael said

<<Because of the bugs in the current version of gnat for DOS streaming,
I recommend putting off implementing stream-io until after the next
version of gnat for DOS is released by some volunteer someday.
>>

Note that there is no current version of GNAT for DOS. It is certainly true
that the 3.07 DOS version is quite out of date at this stage, and the best
advice is to switch to a more recent version (if you are using the PC, choices
are NT/Win95, OS/2, Solaris x86, or Linux, and there are also volunteer ports
for NetBSD and FreeBSD).

Michael is one of the hardy minority who is still interested in DOS per se,
and he puts a lot of energy into loudly complaining about there being no
more recent version for the DOS GNAT port. A (rather small number) of
others have voiced the same complaint, but since we see zero market for
this product, we have dropped support. Unfortunately none of the energy
that has gone into complkaining about this has been diverted into actually
doing something about it.

Note once again that it is perfectly practical for someone to create a DOS
port of the lastest GNAT technology. After all the original port for DOS
was done *from scratch* from a volunteer, and starting with what is here
already for 3.07 is a much easier task.

I don't particularly remember the original message in this thread having
anything to do with DOS, so this may just be a case of Michael using the
opportunity to jump on his DOS hobby horse :-) But in any case if you
are using DOS, you should definitely consider switching to a more recent
version of the technology (both OS wise and GNAT wise)!

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies