Re: Proving Correctness (was Java Portability)

["nicolas" <n.brunot@cadwin.com>]

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"Leif Roar Moldskred" <lrm@huldreheim.provida.no> a �crit dans le message
news: y%Ob7.737$ep5.11352@news1.oke.nextra.no...
> Well, in that case I've officially lost your point. No, Ada doesn't
> have a lot of standard, cross-compiler, cross-platform libraries. So?

Ada doesn't  have a lot of standard, cross-compiler, cross-platform
libraries, this is in my opinion, one of the main reason why so few people
use Ada.
That's the subject of the dicussion.

> Hmmm, I'll admit I'm an Ada-neophyte, but I never thought the Ada
> community hyped these aspects of Ada, anymore than other
> object-oriented programming languages.

I've seen those aspects extremely highly hyped for about 12 years ...
And if you forget them, I think Ada loose the most part of its reason to
exist.

> I can see that they might jump to that conclusion, but I'll disagree
> that they have a reason to. The lack of a wide selection of XML
> libraries is more a question of demand than of the language.

There is few demand for 2 basic reasons
- There are very few Ada users
- Ada users are often very interested in making their own version of already
existing things, forgetting that goes against all their claims to justify
Ada use.

> And as for this particular XML library, it seems to me to be your
> typical one-man open source project. To request that a one-man
> endeavor should be written and tested for several different
> compiler/platform combinations is, in my opinion, unreasonable.
> A better test on the reuse / portability of Ada, would be to consider
> what additional work needs to be done to make this one-compiler,
> one-platform library generally portable.

From my experience, well written Ada code portability is almost
straightforward as long as you care about not using specific compiler
packages or pragmas.
The additional work is almost nothing, The benefits are enormous.
After all, that's what Ada says about maintenance to justify its use.
When you've tested your code against Windows and Linux, with 2 compilers or
let's say just with Gnat public version, if you care about not using
anything compiler specific, any problem you find is very likely a compiler
bug.