Re: New Ada Student

[tmoran@bix.com]

> > There are, of course, some differences between gnat 3.11p and
> > 3.12p, but as a new Ada student you probably won't run into them.
>
> I think the sentence above is the important part of the post. Ada has a
> fairly rigid standard which all compilers (including Gnat) adhere to. No
> compiler can make fundamental changes in the language that they accept
> from version to version, like you may be accustomed to seeing with
  I didn't mean to suggest that either 3.11 or 3.12 make fundamental
changes in the language.  I meant that 3.12 probably fixed some bugs
in 3.11, ie, there exist pieces of source code handled differently by
the two versions.  The existence of 3.13 suggests that 3.12 was also
found to imperfect.  But the kinds of bugs even in old 3.11 are
probably in sufficiently unusual and obscure places that a new Ada
student shouldn't run into them.  The Ada world differs from the
K&R C/Ansi C/Borland C++/Microsoft C++ n.nn/C# world.

  Since I often send Claw (6 MB source) through different versions of
Gnat, and other compilers, I'm rather acutely aware of even some
fairly obscure bugs in, ie differences between, compilers.  There are
also a few obscure things (how you get the instance handle of the app
from the run-time-system, for instance), where the compilers differ
even though the hardware and OS (MS Windows) is the same.  Again, a
new Ada student is unlikely to even notice these kinds of things.