Re: Ada Dot Net ?

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

"Eric G. Miller" <egm2@jps-nospam.net> writes:

> In <uofh26k1h.fsf@gsfc.nasa.gov>, Stephen Leake wrote:
> 
> > "Eric G. Miller" <egm2@jps-nospam.net> writes:
> > 
> >> It's pretty clear from the gcc website that one shouldn't get
> >> there hopes up too high about the quality of the Ada compiler
> >> that will ship with 3.1. It's clearly not their highest priority
> >> (fixing their C++ ABI, again, seems to be). If I had to guess an
> >> order of importance, it'd be C, C++, Fortran, Java, Objective C,
> >> Ada, Chill (maybe dead). Might swap Java/Fortran...
> > 
> > "Importance of integrating" does _not_ equate with "quality"! gcc Ada
> > is a _very_ high quality compiler.
> 
> Well, then maybe the website needs to be fixed. 

Can you provide the url for this website? The closest thing I could
find to your discussion is
http://www.gnu.org/software/gcc/gcc-3.1/criteria.html, which defines
the release criteria for gcc 3.1. Quite sensibly, they are simply
stating that gcc 3.1 will support Ada, but they are not willing to
hold up the release for Ada quality issues. That just means they are
going slow with a new thing. In this case, it happens to be someone
else's job to ensure Ada quality!

> As I read it, the implication is that the GCC community is willing
> to accept a higher number of defects and/or suboptimal code
> generation compared with C or C++. 

"Willing to accept" and "actually present" are two different things. I
have no problem with the gcc steering committee not accepting
responsibility for Gnu Ada quality; ACT is doing a perfectly good job.

> If they really mean the depth of integration with the rest of the
> compiler, the website should say so. Anyway, good to hear the
> compiler works well -- supposed to be released in a couple of weeks,
> no?

I'm not clear precisely which compiler you are talking about here. The
Ada compilers released by ACT work well; I have not tried gcc 3.x yet.

> > The GNAT compiler has an extensive test suite. It's mostly
> > proprietary, consisting of ACT customer code sent in over the
> > years as bug reports. So it doesn't show up in the gcc tree. But
> > the gcc tree code is run against the test suite by ACT.
> 
> Will some kind of results be published with the release?

ACT has said they are working towards putting what tests they can in
the gcc tree; some of their tests are open source. I don't know what
the schedule is.


-- 
-- Stephe