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From: Natasha Kerensikova <lithiumcat@instinctive.eu>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Ada platforms and pricing, was: Re: a new language, designed
 for safety !
Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2014 07:09:13 +0000 (UTC)
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Date: 2014-06-18T07:09:13+00:00
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On 2014-06-17, Luke A  Guest <laguest@archeia.com> wrote:
> You have nailed it completely. I think we are the only people in this group
> who seem to grasp this concept.

For what it's worth, I too am completely with you in that.

And has been already pointed out (IIRC by Jacob Sparre Andersen), the
"2% argument" doesn't really counter that, since compiler avilability
probably drives away a significant part of those 2%ters.

Myself, for example. I'm here only because a few years ago, sheer luck
made me stumble upon wikipedia page for Steelman requirements, and
because GNAT-AUX made Ada available freely on my platform of choice
(FreeBSD/intel, which I believe to be a comparatively easy target).

How many of these 2%ers never heard of Ada and instead stick to C with
-Wall -Wextra -Weven-more -Werror -pedantic
-fblow-a-huge-horn-on-anything-suspicious ?

How many of them give Ada a go, only to drop it when they realize they
can't compile anything for their target platform?


Anyway, I'm willing to contribute a lot of my free time to help a new
free Ada compiler emerge, ideally a LLVM front-end written from scratch
in Ada, bootstrapped by FSF GNAT, licenced under BSD or Apache or
something like that.

I know that way lies madness, but every time I post here it makes me
feel like a complete lunatic on the killfile of most regular posters
here, so I guess I don't have much to lose.

However with only "a lot of my free time" it would still take decades to
make a usable Ada95 LLVM front-end, and I don't really have the people
skills to rally enough people to given a decent chance of success to
such a massive project.

So I guess nothing more than big talk would happen <sigh>.


Natasha