Re: Porting ADA source

["Robert I. Eachus" <rieachus@comcast.net>]

I said:

 > I'll second Randy on this first.  Quick and dirty gets to "sort of
 > working" faster, but doing it right seems to get to working faster,
 > and definitely gets to no bugs much faster...

 > I think that the right path forward would be to migrate the code to
 > GNAT, then use the GNAT version on the Alpha system.  It may be a lot
 > simpler than any other approach, and it certainly should reduce the
 > support costs going forward.

 > Marin David Condic replied:

> Its all rather hypothetical, considering we don't really know what the 
> whole situation is. I naturally agree that if one builds a system and 
> thinks there is a potential need to port, one ought to design in the 
> portability from the start. (Isolate the dependencies at a low level). I 
> also would agree that if a system has a long and profitable future ahead 
> of it, one might be wise to look at a porting situation as an 
> opportunity to fix things that were not designed for portability (or 
> other structural problems that may exist).
> 
> My observation would be that there is a large class of systems where 
> there might be some generally useful capabilities that someone wants to 
> preserve for some relatively small body of users and are therefore 
> porting them to more available hardware, but the systems just plain 
> aren't worth any significan effort to do it "right". Gold plating on 
> systems like this is mostly a waste of resources and I like to see ways 
> of avoiding building Brick Outhouses when this comes up. It happens far 
> more frequently than cases where there is some immensely valuable and 
> profitable tool that is worth investing some redesign effort in.

I understand your concern and you will notice that I was suggesting what 
may be the 'cheapest' way to get to one version of the code on two systems.

But the more fundamental disagreement is one I will persist in.  I have 
only once regretted going to a more 'elegant' solution (and that was in 
a Simscript project quite a while ago).  But it seems like every time I 
decide not to 'clean-up' the design I regret it during debugging. 
Often, you realize that the only reasonable way to fix a particular bug 
it to go back and do the restructuring.

That is why I said that you may be able to get to "sort of working" 
faster with a 'quick and dirty' approach.  But I've been doing this too 
long and have too good a memory (or too many bad memories) to ever make 
that mistake again.

-- 

                                           Robert I. Eachus

"The flames kindled on the Fourth of July, 1776, have spread over too 
much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; 
on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them." 
-- Thomas Jefferson, 1821