Re: Standard Ada Preprocessor

[David Starner <dvdeug@email.ro>]

On Tue, 27 Jan 2004 22:13:36 +0000, Simon Wright wrote:

> This doesn't make sense.
> 
> The latest GCC distribution comes with C, C++, Fortran, Java, Pascal,
> Python, Perl, and --- yes --- Ada. All at practically zero cost.

You're a bit confused. Python and Perl don't come with GCC, and Pascal
isn't a part of the standard GCC distribution.
 
> If I want a supported environment for any of those I will have to pay
> money.

You see two states: the free level and the supported level. 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) and something in-between that a lot of free software
reaches, maybe call it the casually supported.

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. 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.

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.