Re: SGI Developer Magic - Ada95

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

Viqar said

<<The task at hand is to incorporate Ada into large infrastructure
based in C and Fortran, on the SGI Irix platform.  I want to
call the Ada from C and Fortran, without any limitations.
The Verdix compiler we have now doesn't allow "in out" parameters
in procedures.. just "out" parameters.  Also, we're able to link
and run basic programs in GNAT... but have been having other
problems with newer versions of GNAT.  The last stable version
seems to be 3.09.  Therefore, we're a bit GNAT-wary.
>>

I am not quite sure what version of GNAT Viqar has tried, but we are
certainly not aware of any customer problems involving regressions
with respect to 3.09. There can of course be cases where 3.09 works
and 3.10 does not, although we don't know many of these (that is at
this stage pretty much a moot point anyway, since 3.11 is the current
version and has been for a while).

Incidentally, the great majority of cases where complaints have been made
that something worked with version xxx and not with a later version turn
out to be cases where either the program is erroneous and the behavior has
changed, or alternatively that the program was illegal, and the illegality
was not properly diagnosed by the earlier version. This is not to say that
there are no cases of regressions, but they are relatively rare compared
to these kind of issues (a lot of our support work is in sorting out
problems of this kind!)

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies