Re: Only one Ada vendor?

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

<Sloan.Kohler@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1192806306.892546.73350@q5g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
> Its Friday - thought I would try to stir things up...
>
> Several people have stated that "Ada" refers to the latest approved
> version (i.e., Ada => "Ada 2005").  Its been well over a year since
> AdaCore announced Ada 2005 support started shipping a pretty complete
> implementation.  As far as I know, no other vendor has yet announced
> any intention to support the current standard.  Maybe they're working
> on it in secrecy. Maybe they are waiting on customer demand.  Maybe
> they have already lost most of their customers to AdaCore and simply
> don't care anymore.
>
> Whatever the case, I'm concerned that the number of viable Ada vendors
> seems to be shrinking. The benefits of language standardization are
> greatly diminished if only one vendor bothers to support the standard.

I agree. I do know that there are multiple vendors (at least three) working
on the Amendment features, because they have given me feedback on the ACATS
tests that are in development. All of three of the vendors have pointed out
enough test errors that I think it is unlikely that they did so by hand (my
own experience with creating/editing the tests without a viable compiler was
that finding errors was extremely difficult -- only a few errors were
detected that way).

The ACAA has confidentiality rules, so I can't say more. Personally, I think
what you are seeing is mostly an unwillingness to promise something whose
scope is not yet clear -- and may not have a strong demand from their
customers. That's certainly the case with Janus/Ada; we've been doing some
work on the new stuff, but it is a middle priority task.

                          Randy Brukardt, man of many hats. :-)