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From: "Vladimir Olensky" <vladimir_olensky@yahoo.com>
Subject: GNAT port for DOS  (Was:Re: Market Driven was RE: Binding a type to a
 union.)
Date: 1999/12/04
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References: <NBBBJNOMKDIAJALCEFIJMEMODFAA.rleif@rleif.com>
 <821sui$cnt$1@nnrp1.deja.com>
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Date: 1999-12-04T00:00:00+00:00
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Robert Dewar wrote in message <821sui$cnt$1@nnrp1.deja.com>...
>In article <NBBBJNOMKDIAJALCEFIJMEMODFAA.rleif@rleif.com>,
>  comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org wrote:
>> From: Bob Leif
>> To: Robert Dewar et al.
>>
>> Robert Dewar wrote, "we are certainly not in the mode of
>> asking the community for neat ideas!'
>>
>> This process is called being market driven. You have just
>provided a very
>> good explanation for a significant part of Ada's lack of
>commercial success.
>> Most successful companies know the value of consumer input.


>
>Well so far, Ada Core Technologies is being quite successful
>commercially and otherwise. We have made some missteps, which
>interestingly are cases where there was a loud constituency for
>a particular port, notable cases are the Mac, which many people
>were sure had a large crowd of people just itching to get their
>hands on a Mac Ada 95 compiler [actual experience, we had one
>customer who tried to get MachTen to work, but had insuperable
>difficulties using it in a production environment], and another
>notable case was the DOS port, for which there was never even
>one customer (so yes, Vladimir, we do have some cases where we
>invest our own resources in failures :-)


As a matter of fact I do not consider GNAT DOS port to be ACT
failure. It is very nice. Yes it may be  almost impossible to find a big
industrial customer that would use it now   but on the other hand
it helps  to promote Ada (especially with Jerry van Dijk SVGA
package and Gautier graphic libraries) among number of DOS
users.

Surprisingly DOS is not dead yet.

Moreover DOS still could be used  as a simple start up OS for boards
that are built around Intel chips providing some basic services for it.
After
starting Ada  application from DOS that application could take full control
over hardware and not use DOS at all. This could be considered as an Ada
application running on a bare hardware.

I am truing to promote Ada now  for  one of the projects that make  use of
such Intel boxes with DOS.  Hope that result will be positive.
If yes then you will be the first to know about that. Now it is a little
bit yearly to tell anything more.

As I myself do not use GNAT DOS port  I have a basic questions:
How Ada tasks  are implemented and managed in GNAT DOS port ?
The answer may be important in adopting GNAT DOS port for
the thing I have described above.
Probably I will be asked this question soon.

Regards,
Vladimir.