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From: Stephen Leake <Stephe.Leake@nasa.gov>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Standard Library Interest?
Date: 10 Oct 2003 10:37:14 -0400
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Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com> writes:

> A "critical mass" of users? Ada is still looking for one itself. :-)

That's not true, by any sense of the word. "critical mass" means
"enough to sustain itself". ACT and other vendors are making a profit,
and expect to do so for the forseeable future; that meets the
definition of "critical mass".

I see the smiley, but this is too close to what many people say about
Ada; I didn't want to let it go uncorrected.

> Or a "critical mass" of code? There's lots of code out there -
> probably more than enough to be of interest to and useful for the
> average developer. But its all a jumble of stuff of mixed quality,
> etc. Pulling it together in one place doesn't change that. A few
> million lines of random code doesn't make a library anyone wants to
> use.

Right. A "critical mass" of users of the library is essential; that
means people find it useful, and will do word-of-mouth advertising.

> If it expects to gain some widespread use, it has to be a *good*
> library that is well integrated and well documented. I don't think
> it could be cobbled together from a bunch of packages found on the
> Internet.

Note that ACT is doing this "library" thing already; that's what all
the Gnat.* packages are.

-- 
-- Stephe