Re: Overriding discriminants perplexes GNAT 3.14p

[Stephen Leake <stephen.a.leake.1@gsfc.nasa.gov>]

Dmitry A.Kazakov <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> writes:

> Stephen Leake wrote:
> > You are making a couple of assumptions that I find dubious.
> > 
> > 1) More and cheaper customers = higher quality
> > 
> > I don't believe this, because the first consequence of more cheaper
> > customers is to spread your support personnel thinner, so they have
> > less time to write quality fixes for the bugs that get reported.
> 
> Consider personal PC's today and mainframes of 60's. In a long term 
> perspective cheaper products bring higher quality. This could be [and 
> usualy is] undesirable from the point of view of a product vendor. Well, 
> this is how they try to resist to, let's say, progress and then disapper.

That's only true when there are economies of scale. Intel can make
millions of identical Pentiums, and make a profit. ACT cannot make
millions of identical support responses. Remember, their business is
support to people, each of whom has unique needs.

> > 2) ACT customers do not require all strengths of Ada.
> > 
> > GNAT is the only compiler to support _all_ of the Ada Annexes. ACT
> > only supports code that customers demand.
> 
> So they dropped JGNAT. Could this happen if GNAT were widely used in web 
> applications?

Yes. It just means the JVM is not an appropriate target for web
applications. I don't do web stuff myself, but my understanding is
that the Java hype for this application is just that; hype.

The question was not "is Ada good for web applications" but "do ACT
customers use all of Ada".

> > So I have to believe that there is at least one ACT customers
> > using each part of Ada. Which also helps defeat assumption 1).
> 
> I hope so. But you should admit that a wider use of GNAT would make it 
> better.

Well, that is precisely what I am not admitting :). Paying good people
to write good code, and getting high-quality feedback from serious
users, is an excellent model for producing a quality product. That
does _not_ mean you have to have "a lot" of customers; just "enough"
customers.

MS Windows has way more users than GNAT; is it better? How about MS
VC++? 

-- 
-- Stephe