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From: Simon Clubley <clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Newcomers to comp.lang.ada: welcome and how did you end up here ?
Date: Thu, 9 Oct 2014 21:08:28 +0000 (UTC)
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Date: 2014-10-09T21:08:28+00:00
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On 2014-10-09, Mark Carroll <mtbc@bcs.org> wrote:
> Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org> writes:
>> If you are prepared to use the FSF GCC unsupported (except by the
>> goodwill of folk here, on Stack Overflow, and on IRC somewhere), and you
>> can get hold of a build with Ada enabled (Debian Linux (easy),
>> probably other Linux distributions, Mac OS X, ...) then you can
>> develop code and release binaries under any licence that you want:
>> see GCC Runtime Library Exception
> (snip)
>
> That is great news, and makes the situation much less surprising to me.
> I think that in my reading I had realized that GNAT Pro is different,
> but I must have conflated GNAT FSF with GNAT GPL (especially as the FSF
> have typically done GPL enforcement!). Thank you very much. Further
> reading suggests that GNAT FSF even supports Ada 2012. I'll thus stick
> around and look more closely at a couple of recent Ada books. (-:
>

First off, thanks to everyone for your replies. It was interesting
reading how you ended up in comp.lang.ada.

The problem with FSF GNAT is that once you try to use it with something
other than mainstream desktop style operating systems you run into
major problems or find outright it simply doesn't work.

There are many areas in which Ada could be a viable candidate for
projects, but the lack of freely available Ada compilers, without
GPL restrictions on the generated code, across a wide range of
platforms/targets kills the idea of using Ada in those areas stone
dead sadly.

Simon.

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