Re: Five Years After

[Simon Clubley <clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP>]

On 2018-01-23, Luke A  Guest <laguest@archeia.com> wrote:
> Robert Eachus <rieachus@comcast.net> wrote:
>> Who is supplying Ada compiler support for projects which have "frozen" project 
>> language levels at Ada 83/87, Ada 95, Ada 2007, and Ada 2012.
>
> See above considering there?s no other vendor right now who supplies Ada
> above 95.
>

Is Adacore actually cutting back on the number of supported platforms ?

I've recently been told that Adacore no longer support VMS. I wonder
if this is a one-off or part of a larger cutback in the number of
platforms that Adacore are willing to support.

>
>> 
>> I could see projects deciding that Ada 95 was too big a change--in spite
>> of all the work we did to limit migration issues.  On the other hand Ada
>> 2007, and 2012 may have been seen as too small a change to bother with. 
>> Also having a validated compiler doesn't seem to matter as much as it did
>> in the last century. ;-)
>
> There?s some really nice additions in 2005 and 2012. But I think the
> language is getting too large, maybe.
>

Going the other way, a subset of Ada might be useful as well.

There's serious potential for a good small language that could serve
as an easily implemented C language replacement. It's possible that
a subset of Ada with just the core features implemented and hence
without vast amounts of required runtime library support could
serve that purpose.

Think of something that had the kind of functionality of a beefed up
version of Oberon with all of the Ada type safety features imported
into it for example.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
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