GNAT Professional machine code listings (was: An Ada Advice Inquiry)

[Kilgallen@SpamCop.net (Larry Kilgallen)]

In article <uwszmygs0.fsf@stephe-leake.org>, Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org> writes:
> Michael Bode <m.g.bode@web.de> writes:
> 
>> Pascal Obry <pascal@obry.net> writes:
>>
>>> Frankly I 100% agree with Stephen. Ada gives a big advantage against the
>>> concurrence, why not use it just for that. An better question to me
>>> whould be : who is providing compilers, tools and support for Ada? Looks
>>> like the Ada market is fine to me.
>>
>> Wanted: affordable cross platform (i.e. Windows + Linux) Ada
>> development system. No licensing restrictions for software produced
>> with said development system.
> 
> You need to better define "affordable". I'm assuming from tone of
> later posts that the GNAT Professional fee is "not affordable". But
> for my project, that is easily affordable.

The last I read in this newsgroup. ACT was inexorably opposed to the
generation of machine code listing files.  For us this makes their
offering a non-starter.  We need to be able to have a customer for
our commercial product send back a stack dump from a production release
of the software.  Then we need to be able to use that information to
see exactly which instruction went south.  That makes GNAT Pro
a non-starter as I see it.

Yes, it is extremely rare for something to go wrong in this fashion
with software written in Ada, but when/if it does we need to be able
to address the problem without asking the customer for too many details
about their environment (for which they may be quite secretive).

As an example of an unanticipated problem in our Ada code, some
sites turn out to have mistakenly converted an indexed file to a
sequential file.  When our Ada software tried to read that file
according to the index things went South.  Fixing the software
to give a clear message in that case is straightforward.  Getting
sufficient information back from the customer (and in some cases
through their official information release process) can be quite
a problem, so having the exact addresses of instructions in the
code for the version they are running is crucial.