Re: Migrating to Ada : a mini success story

[Simon Clubley <clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP>]

On 2010-02-13, Hibou57 <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr> wrote:
> Hello once again,
>
> Here is a new quote about Ada, in another interesting context (no more LP  
> this time) :
> http://gmarceau.qc.ca/blog/2009/05/speed-size-and-dependability-of.html
>
> Lanny wrote (2009 dated, so let suppose it was Ada 2005):
>> Several years ago, I was doing a one-programmer job to move a large
>> medical-laboratory instrumentation control from DIBOL to Ada. I was
>> using the open-source GNAT Ada compiler and the DIBOL compiler from
>> Synergex, as I had to maintain the old DIBOL program while writing
>> its replacement in Ada. Unfortunately, the project was canceled
>> after three months of work when the laboratory was sold, but I was
>> able to compare DIBOL and Ada with respect to the time needed to
>> find and fix a bug, and Ada was a huge win. Most DIBOL bugs took a
>> full day to run down, and the worst-case bugs required 4 days to run
>> down. During the same three months, the large majority of Ada bugs
>> were found and fixed in 15 minutes or less, and the most difficult
>> one took 4 hours.
>

I actually use DIBOL (along with other more traditional languages) as
part of my day job and there are times when I dream about replacing
it with Ada after tripping up over yet another language feature or not
been able to model a problem in the way I can in Ada.

Unfortunately, he doesn't say what features of the Synergex toolkit
he uses as it's more than just a compiler. Given it's intended use in
business applications, it contains, amongst other things, a forms toolkit
which will run on a character cell terminal and a file toolkit
which implements support for ISAM files with multiple and segmented keys.

The forms toolkit is actually quite advanced given it's character cell
requirements, containing the ability to define a form in terms of fields
containing different types of data (alpha, numeric, dates, etc) and
containing support for callback routines for custom field level validation.

I would love to find an open source equivalent of the forms and ISAM
toolkits which could be called from Ada.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980's technology to a 21st century world