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From: "Alejandro R. Mosteo" <alejandro@mosteo.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Inspirels Ada on cortex tutorial linker issue
Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2016 11:15:35 +0200
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Xref: news.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:31673
Date: 2016-09-01T11:15:35+02:00
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On 31/08/16 14:42, Maciej Sobczak wrote:
> On Monday, August 29, 2016 at 11:51:36 PM UTC+2, riea...@comcast.net wrote:
>> All in all, much, much better than other languages where moving an application from one compiler to another for the same target can take weeks.
>
> Sorry, but this argument is as wrong as it is frequently repeated.
> If you move Ada to another compiler, you can be sure that your gnatmake will not work anymore. And then it will take weeks to configure the new tool.
>
> Similarly, I can see people arguing that Ada is more portable than "other languages" (meaning C), because they never move outside of GNAT. If you don't change the compiler, then Ada and "other languages" are similarly portable. There is nothing magic in Ada, it is a single toolchain that people are attached to (for whatever reason), that makes their code kind of portable or stable.

I cannot agree with that. The differences an psychological effect of 
changing toolchains might be the same, but certainly Ada is (or was) 
more portable in my experience. C/C++ may have come a long way with 
standardization efforts, but I remember my university times and that was 
eye-opening.

At that time, most deliverables where submitted and tested in some HP 
UNIX. We of course tried to advance work in our PCs. This would involve 
at least gnat and meridian compilers. C++ at that time (circa 2000) was 
nightmarish on its inconsistencies. The first time I took Ada code and 
it compiled and worked just the same across compilers I realized things 
could be better.

Admittedly, they were not very large projects. I guess C++ is long 
beyond that point, but at the time it was one of the things in Ada that 
attracted me. And in the end Ada mandates consistency when using library 
units. Even meridian did that, even if less easily. So you know that if 
not gnatmake/gprbuild you should have something else for the same purpose.

Even using the same compilers... I would bet on my Ada code from those 
days being easier to bring up to date to current gccs than my C/C++ one.

Ah, how time flies...