Re: Ada -vs- GNAT

[Pascal Obry <p.obry@wanadoo.fr>]

tmoran@acm.org writes:

>   Which is like being a little bit pregnant.  It means the potential user
> must:  switch to Gnat; start a new branch of the update tree; or not use
> your package.  It makes life simpler for you, harder for your users, and
> (possibly) richer for ACT.  Just remember all those consequences of your
> decision.

I agree with your point. But since many libraries are missing from the Ada
standard it is hard to not do so. This was one goal for AWS (not using
compiler specific packages)... But it would have been too much work to
implement an equivalent for GNAT.Regexp, GNAT.Regpat, GNAT.Table,
GNAT.Directory_Operations and GNAT.Calendar.Time_IO...

Maybe this will change with the next Ada revision, but I don't think most
hobbyist have the resources to buy all Ada compilers around and spend time to
check wether the program works with all compilers or to build all kind of
helper libraries, you want to concentrate your effort on the main problem (for
AWS it was on the Web framework) especially since free time is quite
expensive ;) And yes in this context GNAT is the compiler of choice... 
Building Open Source software with an Open Source compiler.

Pascal.

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