From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,38159b1b5557a2e7 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2004-01-20 09:46:05 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news2.google.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newsfeed.mathworks.com!wn14feed!worldnet.att.net!207.35.177.252!nf3.bellglobal.com!nf1.bellglobal.com!nf2.bellglobal.com!news20.bellglobal.com.POSTED!not-for-mail From: "Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Standard Ada Preprocessor (Was: why ada is so unpopular ?) References: <49cbf610.0401170627.79c3dfe5@posting.google.com> <400A9B48.3060100@noplace.com> <400BD4B5.6000307@noplace.com> <400BDB7C.40100@noplace.com> <400D2150.6000705@noplace.com> In-Reply-To: <400D2150.6000705@noplace.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2004 12:31:51 -0500 NNTP-Posting-Host: 198.96.223.163 X-Complaints-To: abuse@sympatico.ca X-Trace: news20.bellglobal.com 1074619859 198.96.223.163 (Tue, 20 Jan 2004 12:30:59 EST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2004 12:30:59 EST Organization: Bell Sympatico Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:4576 Date: 2004-01-20T12:31:51-05:00 List-Id: Marin David Condic wrote: > Preben Randhol wrote: >> Well, who would be in charge of an Ada GUI and develop it actively and >> not every 10-15 years ? ... > Ada has this "Portability Fetish" that often cripples it. "If we can't > make a feature work on everything from a PC to a digital toaster then it > can't be part of the language!" We solve that with some kind of library > external to the standard that exists in source and works on some stated > number of platforms and where it doesn't work - don't try to use it. The > problem, of course, is to get the vendors to actually think that Ada > *needs* something like this and exhibit the will & leadership to get it. ... > MDC Portability of course is an important issue. This becomes even more important to Open Sourced projects, since they must be easy to compile and maintain for all/most flavours of UNIX, and different Windows environments (native and/or CYGWIN etc.) (I'll probably take some heat for this but..) In my opinion, the preprocessing of C code has made C the clear winner (and now C++) for portability. Examples of code that compiles and runs on the ancient Atari, BeOS, UNIX and Windows etc are not hard to find. Unless the Ada code is pretty much disconnected from the operating system, you won't find the same level of portability. Granted preprocessing results in ugly code. But it is pretty clear that developers prefer to maintain one source module, rather than trying to keep 10+ parallel modules synchronized (for each supported platform). It is certainly my preference to centralize maintenance. Any time you can centralize the control of something, maintenance becomes cleaner, and is forced to be consistent (much like database normalization). gnatprep obviously helps to address this issue for the "gnat world". But IMHO Ada could be well served if there was a standard for an Ada preprocessors. Its use of course would be optional (for the purests and those situations where it is not needed), but a standard would make Ada code more easily portable. Failing that, everyone must bake their own solution to this problem. Many maintain that by centralizing problem code into separate libraries works well enough. But this does not help in the cases where a product can be compiled with different options turned on or not (say from a Makefile). In other cases, it may mean enhancements involve maintenance of several parallel modules, instead of one centralized location. I havn't checked to see if any current discussions are taking place about the possibility of standardizing a preprocessor. But if were to guess, it has been discussed and summarily dismissed on religious grounds ;-) -- Warren W. Gay VE3WWG http://ve3wwg.tk