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From: David Starner <dvdeug@email.ro>
Subject: Re: Standard Ada Preprocessor
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On Tue, 27 Jan 2004 13:00:31 -0500, Warren W. Gay VE3WWG wrote:
> Perhaps this is getting to the root of the "real" problem. ;-)
> 
> Perhaps we "lowly programmers" need to ditch Ada, and reinvent
> our own flavour of the same. After all, only "lowly programmers"
> would need to worry about such dirty things as portability.

My feelings too. 15 years ago, someone made a killing by releasing a
Turbo Pascal for under a hundred bucks, and made Pascal a major language.
Free software has helped drop the off-the-shelf price of a complete Un*x
system with C, C++, Pascal and Lisp compilers to under a hundred bucks.
But I still get quoted a price of $700 for an Ada compiler. Maybe that's
fine for ye system engineers, but programmers, especially we student
programmers, don't have a wealth of money to drop on compilers. Perhaps I
need to find a new hammer.