Re: Standard Ada Preprocessor

[Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@acm.org>]

David Starner <dvdeug@email.ro> writes:

> ... Because of how
> I work, I see three: the unsupported (which may cost a pretty penny, but
> you won't get much direct support), the professionally supported (I've at
> least heard of places where you pay huge bucks and get engineers at your
> beck and call) 

One such place is Ada Core Technologies, the maintainers of GNAT, the
Free Software Gnu Ada compiler.

> and something in-between that a lot of free software reaches, maybe
> call it the casually supported.

Like Lynx OS, VxWorks (not free software; also not very good support).

> If I submit a bug report on the C compiler in GCC, it will get
> examined, treated respectfully and it's not even inconceivable that
> a fix will get backported in the release branch, either by the GCC
> maintainers or by the Debian maintainers. It is high importance to
> all people working on most of those compilers that they continue to
> run in the latest released GCC and libc. I've submitted a
> documentation bug on GNAT that has not been dealt with. 

As a paying customer, I get fast and excellent response from ACT. I
have submitted many bug reports.

> There are two GCC frontends in risk of being dropped in the GCC 3.5
> release because of large structural changes; Fortran 77, which has
> no active maintainers, and Ada. The cumulative effect is that GNAT
> is effectively unsupported, where most of the other compilers
> (Fortran 77 excepted) are casually supported.

I don't know where you get your information; ACT says otherwise. They
are making it a high priority to keep the Ada in the gcc distribution
working and up-to-date. Not as high a priority as satisfying paying
customers, of course. But they see a good Free Software Ada compiler
as excellent advertising for their services. In the past, they have
released public versions of GNAT, usually based on slightly old
versions of gcc. Now, they are trying to keep up with the current gcc
versions, since they see that as even better advertising.

> As GNAT is the only Ada compiler that is Free software, that has a
> negative effect on how Ada is viewed in the world of Free software,
> and how a programmer who intends his programs to end up in the world
> of Free software should react.

Getting the facts is always a good idea ...

-- 
-- Stephe