Re: will ada always be supported by gcc?

[Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com>]

leo.brewin@internode.on.net writes:

> I've been a long time user of Pascal and I'm worried that my compiler
> of choice, gpc pascal for MacOSX, may fall over in the next release of
> MacOSX. The good folks that have supported gpc Pascal over the years
> are unlikely to do the job on an ongoing basis. So I need a plan B
> which currently is to port my roughly 1 million lines of code to Ada.

If you have a million lines of Pascal, I suspect it would be cheaper
to maintain the Pascal compiler yourself, or pay somebody to do so,
rather than converting it all to Ada.

Converting a large well-working program from one language to another
is rarely a good idea.

> My worry is that I might run into the same problem with Ada -- can I
> be sure that Ada will continue to be part of the GCC compiler suite
> for a long time?

Yes, I think GNAT will continue to exist for a long time.
I hope so, since I make a living maintaining GNAT and other
AdaCore products.

To answer your subject line, "will ada always be supported by gcc?":
I hope not ALWAYS.  ;-)  Surely 100 years from now, people will be using
much better programming languages than the ones we have now, including
Ada!

- Bob