Re: Ada platforms and pricing, was: Re: a new language, designed for safety !

[Jeffrey Carter <spam.jrcarter.not@spam.not.acm.org>]

On 06/18/2014 12:09 AM, Natasha Kerensikova wrote:
>
> And has been already pointed out (IIRC by Jacob Sparre Andersen), the
> "2% argument" doesn't really counter that, since compiler avilability
> probably drives away a significant part of those 2%ters.
>
> Myself, for example. I'm here only because a few years ago, sheer luck
> made me stumble upon wikipedia page for Steelman requirements, and
> because GNAT-AUX made Ada available freely on my platform of choice
> (FreeBSD/intel, which I believe to be a comparatively easy target).

This is more likely the reason many software engineers don't use Ada: they are 
not aware of it. You stumbled upon Ada by accident; how many others who would 
use Ada have not been so lucky? I don't think free-compiler availability is part 
of it. There are free compilers for the most common development environments 
(Windows and various forms of Unix) to allow such people to learn and experiment 
with the language. Once they get to the point of wanting to use it on obscure 
platform X they're already hooked.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"When Bell Labs were invited to evaluate C against the DoD requirements
[for Ada], they said that there was no chance of C meeting the
requirements of readability, safety, etc. for which we were striving,
and that it should not even be on the list of evaluated languages."
William Whitaker
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