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From: "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: GNAT GPL is not shareware
Date: Wed, 7 Jan 2015 16:58:22 -0600
Organization: Jacob Sparre Andersen Research & Innovation
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Date: 2015-01-07T16:58:22-06:00
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"Shark8" <OneWingedShark@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:1rfrw.561039$ZT5.125723@fx07.iad...
...
>> I guess this did not happen with Gnat. See below
>
> No, it was with either a GCC or G++ that I had to use at the time. 
> (Remember; we're talking about handling programming in-general -- not Ada 
> specifically and not GNAT in particular.)

But we *are* only talking about Ada (or a very small set of languages). The 
odds of being able to build the thing you describe for all programming 
languages is non-existent, even for an amazingly deep-pocketed company. 
You'd have to build the equivalent of a (simple) compiler for each language 
in order to extract semantic information. That could only happen for the 
most popular languages -- it could never be very general.

Moreover, if you are talking about getting people to use a whiz-bang unified 
tool instead of whatever they do now -- no chance. Remember that Ada already 
does the sorts of version checks that you are worrying about. So one could 
argue that such a whiz-bang system already exists. And we know how well 
getting people to use that has been.

You might say "it's not practical for everyone to program only in Ada". 
Perhaps, but you'll quickly find that the same holds true for *any* system 
that is supposed to do everything. No system can do everything, and the 
problem occurs when you have to go outside of it. So that suggests to me 
that it would be most practical to just get people to do more in Ada -- and 
that already exists.

                           Randy.