Re: Seeking advice

[Preben Randhol <randhol+news@pvv.org>]

Tony wrote:
> My apologies in advance if some of these questions have been answered
> recently or are contained in a FAQ that I should have read before posting :)
> 
> I would like to begin doing some commercial programming and ADA seems like a
> very appealing language.  However, I am concerned about a number of issues:

Ada not ADA. Ada is a name not a Three Letter Abbreviation

> 1. Development environments seem to be horrendously expensive.  Are there
> any reasonably priced (for me this means probably sub $1000) compilers/IDEs
> available?

GNAT

> 2. Are there any licencing issues with using the gnat compiler for
> commercial work?

No

> 3. Is interest in ADA increasing/remaining steady/decreasing?  For example,
> will ADA still have significant support in, say, five years?

Hard to say anything about five years. Maybe C/C++ is ban by law by then
for all I know, but I hope I still can fly airplanes with Ada inside. I
have also noticed that people from the mobile/telecommunication companies;
Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens (IIRC) seem to be doing Ada.

I don't know about the commercial sector, but these points I find
important for growth of Ada among young people:

   [] Gnat is getting included in gcc
   [] GPS (Gnat's IDE) will hopefully be released to the public
   [] Kdeveloper getting Ada support
   [] GtkAda
   [] Gnade and APQ
   [] SDL bindings
   [] AdaXML
   [] And a standard library for dealing with list etc...

> 4. Are there any graphics libraries which are supported on multiple
> platforms (preferably Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris)?

GtkAda and SDL are your best bets.

-- 
Preben Randhol ---------------- http://www.pvv.org/~randhol/ --
"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent", Isaac Asimov