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From: Simon Clubley <clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: GNAT GPL is not shareware
Date: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 02:06:47 +0000 (UTC)
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Date: 2015-01-10T02:06:47+00:00
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On 2015-01-09, Mark Carroll <mtbc@bcs.org> wrote:
>
> My point isn't use Haskell, not Ada. (-: It's more that, in the modern
> landscape, Ada's value proposition may not look so strong relatively for
> anyone not already working on products for which Ada is already
> entrenched, and when googling finds the curious a confusing and alarming
> licensing story -- for instance, if it looks at a glance like for
> compiling closed-source products, the only affordable compiler that
> implements the latest language spec appears to be a year behind in
> bug-fixes to help get the very expensive one sold -- then I can imagine
> that many small businesses might shrug and move on.
>

As someone who really likes Ada but isn't as deeply emotionally involved
with it as many others here, I've been saying the above for years here
in comp.lang.ada so I strongly agree with you. Sometimes, there's been a
tendency for people deeply involved with Ada to stick their head in the
sand when it comes to trying to make them understand how Ada is perceived
by the outside world.

The other barrier (for some) is that you can't build the FSF compiler,
out of the box, as a cross compiler for a number of targets in the same
easy way as you can with C. As one of Ada's strengths is in the embedded
world (and hence should be a good way to attract newcomers, including
hobbyists, to Ada), that is a major annoyance.

Yes, I am very aware that some of the common hobbyist MCUs (such as the
AVR and MSP430) do have Ada compilers for them (as third party efforts)
but I am talking about the general case.

C is not a good language by today's standards, but it runs _everywhere_
which is one of the reasons why people continue to use it.

Simon.

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