Re: Government Policy on Ada Acquisitions

[mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)]

In article <INFO-ADA%94090809431667@vm1.nodak.edu>,
 <CONDIC@PSAVAX.PWFL.COM> wrote:

>On the other hand, GNAT might very well be a piece of crap that
>is too large, too slow, too hard to modify, too costly to bring
>to validation, and so on. If that's the case, I could see why
>vendors would want to steer clear of it in favor of their own,
>ground up development. (This was true of lots of early Ada83
>software that was funded by the government.)

It would be very easy for you to check this out for yourself.
Just ftp it. Got a DOS box? Got an OS/2 box?

If vendors are _not_ spending some effort trying to figure out how
they can exploit GNAT to their advantage, they are more out of it
than I was even giving them credit for.

>But from the noise I hear from this and other nets concerning
>GNAT, I don't get the impression that it is a hopeless corpus of
>software. It may very well be possible to take GNAT, target it to
>a few critical systems (PC, Mac, PowerPC,...) and produce a
>commercially viable product for, say, under $200 and get it out
>there competing with C/C++ and all the rest.

Well, the source code for the _compiler_ would still have to be
provided (GPL license terms), but you are absolutely right about 
the rest.
>
>Anyone out there interested in starting up a venture?

You serious?

Mike Feldman
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Michael B. Feldman -  chair, SIGAda Education Working Group
Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The George Washington University -  Washington, DC 20052 USA
202-994-5253 (voice) - 202-994-0227 (fax) - mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Internet)
"Pork is all that stuff the government gives the other guys."
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