Re: GNAT GPL Edition Maintenance and Upgrades

[Maciej Sobczak <no.spam@no.spam.com>]

Martin Dowie wrote:

>>I guess that for any product there exists an arbitrary meaning of
>>"good enough" that can prevent it from being released, ever.
>>
>>The version of GNAT that I got with my Linux distribution allows me to
>>overflow the Integer type without any exceptions at run time (and I
>>can also define my own range and overflow it without error). I guess
>>that with some chosen meaning of "good enough" this compiler would
>>not be released.
> 
> Even with "-gnato"????

That's exactly the point - I *can* use -gnato and get the expected 
functionality (which means errors when overflowing), but I had to learn 
about this switch the hard way. I've expected the Ada compiler to be 
compliant *by default* and force me to go through some pain to overcome 
the rules, not the other way round, so for me this was disappointing. 
This is where the arbitrary meaning of "good enough" comes into play. 
There's always appropriate definition of "good enough" that makes a 
particular product satisfactory or disappointing - depending on what we 
want to prove.

Coming back to the question why g++ is released in spite of the "issues" 
- it took many years of development to get it more or less compliant to 
the C++ standard from 1998, so all releases really had/have issues. Not 
releasing would mean that the community could not gain any new 
experience - and this experience and resulting feedback is important for 
the project (and the community) to make progress.


-- 
Maciej Sobczak : http://www.msobczak.com/
Programming    : http://www.msobczak.com/prog/