Re: Mixing Cygnus & Gnat compilers on the same machine

[Matthias Andree <matthias.andree@gmx.de>]

Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>  writes:

> I'm not sure what you mean by this. I'm the maintainer of the
> SETI@Home Service (see
> http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/SETI/SETI_Service.html ), a free
> software project written in Ada95 using Gnat. It has quite a few
> users, and none of them had to install anything special other than the
> program executables themselves.

Well, that's a binary package. You end up compiling binaries for all
kinds of systems, while most sites have a C compiler installed, be it
the vendor's product like sunpro or mipspro, or gcc, or both.

> Perhaps you are talking about distributing sources, and not having to
> install a separate compiler. For my user-base that's not really much
> of an issue, as very few Win2K/NT users have a compiler of any sort
> installed, let alone the (non-Gnat) gcc compiler. I understand this is
> now typical for propriatary Unixes as well, exept that most users go
> ahead and pay extra for the C compiler.

I'm usually using FreeBSD, Linux and look after some Solaris boxes at
university, Windows (of any kind) is not common. The free unix clones
come with gcc, FreeBSD 4.3-RELEASE (current release) has gcc 2.95.2, for
example. I agree that gcc on Windows is not too common, because many
people who want to use gcc go for The Real Thing, some variant of Unix,
that is. Less hassle to set up, more efficient in use (Yes, I'm aware of
the Cygwin project).

If an Ada compiler was part of gcc, it would be pre-installed at many
unix sites, thus, Ada would become more widely known.

In the meanwhile, I'm going to get Wheeler's Lovelace tutorial on Ada 95
from my local university library.

-- 
Matthias Andree