Re: Government Policy on Ada Acquisitions

Re: Government Policy on Ada Acquisitions

[Michael M. Bishop]

In article <aetechca.3.000FE9D9@powergrid.electriciti.com>,
Jim Dorman <aetechca@powergrid.electriciti.com> wrote:
[...snip...]
>The government terminated the Ada9X User/Implementer projects for 
>commercial companies in order to fund the development of a free 
>non-validated compiler (GNAT) for the Free Software Foundation, an 
>organization which blatantly espouses the concept that 
>intellectual property created by others should be free to the 
>public if it happens to be software? I hate to sling terms around, 
>but truly, truly, this is socialism at its quintessence.

It should be mentioned here that there are free GNU C and C++ compilers
available, also. This is one of the reasons that GNAT was developed.
Many people will choose C or C++ over Ada for development purposes
because they can get free compilers. One of the purposes of GNAT is to
get quick, early exposure for Ada 9X. Since GNAT is free, people will
probably be more likely to try it out. If they like what they see, they
might be motivated to buy a validated compiler system for use on
projects, since GNAT is a non-validated compiler (actually, a
translator). The main reason for projects like GNAT is to try to
generate a larger market for Ada so more vendors will get involved.
So, these guys (DISA, etc.) have capitalism in mind. Don't throw words
like "socialism" around in an attempt to alarm people. I believe that
the vast majority of c.l.a. readers aren't going to fall for that.
-- 
| Mike Bishop              | The opinions expressed here reflect    |
| bishopm@source.asset.com | those of this station, its management, |
| Member: Team Ada         | and the entire world.                  |

Re: Government Policy on Ada Acquisitions

[Kevin D. Heatwole]

Jim Dorman (aetechca@powergrid.electriciti.com ) writes:
> 
> The way to ruin a budding commercial enterprise is for the 
> government to PAY NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATIONS TO DEVELOP THINGS AND 
> THEN GIVE THEM AWAY. For the benefit of those in academia, this is 
> how things are actually working. The problem with this approach is 
> that it ruins the incentive of industry  to compete. Why should 
> Alsys, AETECH or RRS commit $900K to develop and maintain a 
> validated $99 Ada9X compiler for academia, when the government 
> issues a non-competitive sole-source contract to NYU for $2.5 
> million dollars to build a non-validated GNAT compiler from 
> scratch to be given away free? 
> 

Being an employee of one of the "budding commercial enterprises" in 
the Ada industry, I, too, share Jim's concerns (I'd like to remain
employed ;-)).  The costs of competing in this environment are very 
high (you need a minimum of at least $1 million a year in on-going 
revenue if you are even going to think about supporting an Ada 
compiler).  That being said, I am still confident in our ability to 
compete with any "cheap" compiler, even if it is "of high quality", 
but it does make you think twice before entering the game.

Regardless, I think it is good to have a discussion on the effects 
on the existing Ada compiler vendors (there are fewer and fewer these
days) of a potentially "commercially viable" compiler built with 
public money.

One solution might have been to build into the GNAT contract with
the government, the restriction that GNAT could not be validated for
a specified period (say, until the year 2000), even by an independent 
commercial enterprise.  This would slow the introduction of free
compilers into the government for "real" projects (where commercial 
Ada vendors currently derive much of their revenue), but not prevent
the government from using it in places where "validated" compilers are
required.  It is in the best long term interest of the government to 
have a thriving Ada market.  Also, the validation status of an Ada 
compiler in the commercial market place (non-US government) is of 
little concern to commercial users, so GNAT/Ada would succeed/fail on 
its own merits.

Anyway, this is just my opinion.  I only speak for myself and do not
speak for my employer.

Kevin D. Heatwole
OC Systems, Inc.

Re: Government Policy on Ada Acquisitions

[Michael Feldman]

In article <34kef8$l9f@jac.zko.dec.com>,
Bevin R. Brett <brett@ada9x.enet.dec.com> wrote:

[this is the only point I'm going to respond to]
>
>Ada'83 was too hard to learn
>----------------------------
>
>It has taken 10 years to figure out that an Ada'83 subset is easier to learn
>than C or Pascal or Cobol.  This realisation would have been valuable in 1982,
>but instead we pushed all the exotic features...

Who are you referring to as "we"? We in the universities, some of whom have
been teaching CS1 and CS2 courses with Ada for ten years (names on request)
have known this all along, and acted on it. We've known how to teach Ada
and done so quite well. Unfortunately, the industry gave us little
cooperation in helping us spread the word (compiler/tool pricing, etc.),
but we've been there all along, teaching Ada in increasingly large
subsets in each subsequent course. Industry tended to label us as
insufferably "academic".


[well, OK, I'll respond to this one too.]

>Ada'9X is too late and too complex
>----------------------------------

>C[++] is a poor language, but when it is the only language that supports 99% of
>the bindings and reusable components available, it is going to be a very
>common language - which in turn means it will be the language used for
>bindings and reusable components...

I have a really wacky, fuzzy-headed academic sort-of idea.

How 'bout if all the Ada companies who are sitting and bitching about
the lack of tools, and fighting GNAT at every turn, 

- adopted GNAT as their core compiler (Can't make money doing an Ada 
  94 compiler? Take the free one, then!), ported it to every machine
  in sight;

- turned their creativity to making the world's best GNAT-compatible tools 
  (which can damn well be proprietary), and competing with other on
  _that_ battlefield; and

- pooled their compiler development funds to ensure that GNAT will
  blow the doors off every C++ compiler in sight? (That is, sign
  contracts with ACT, or spin off another company like ACT.)

Make GNAT _the_ standard Ada 94 compiler, sorta just like DOS. Remember 
Mister Gillette: give away the razor; soak 'em for the blades. Compete
with the tools instead, and the bindings, and the safety-critcal
runtime libraries, and...

Nah. Too academic. Right?

Mike Feldman
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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."
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Government Policy on Ada Acquisitions

[Bob Wells #402]

Jim Dorman/Thomes <aetechca@powergrid.electriciti.com> wrote:

> What will be the benefits of the proliferation of free non-
> validated, partially implemented, non-supported, un-maintained Ada
> compilers and libraries? I believe we can logically expect the
> same kind of razor-sharp support from NYU as we get from the Post
> Office.
>

G'day,
All I can say is that after getting two copies of your demo disk, both
of which didn't work, I not so sure about the razor-sharp support found
in *some* non-socialist compiler vendors.
Bob W. (-:

P.S. Didn't **anyone** out there have any ideas about my 'Image
problem? (Integer'Image that is!! ) Thanks for your input Tim C.

Re: Government Policy on Ada Acquisitions

[Oliver E. Cole]

Michael Feldman (mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu ) writes:

   [snip]

> 
> How 'bout if all the Ada companies who are sitting and bitching about
> the lack of tools, and fighting GNAT at every turn, 
   
  [snip]

   OCS welcomes the gnat effort and has cooperated with Robert early on,
giving him the experience of our efforts connecting Ada front ends
to C backends.  Please do not lump all "Ada companies" together.

   We realize that to survive we need to be better than the competition and
gnat is part of that competition.  No animosity, no complaining, just
rededicated to the task of making the best Ada stuff on earth.

   These views do represent the views of my employer.

--oec

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Oliver E. Cole                                               oec@ocsystems.com
OC Systems, Inc.                                                (703) 359-8165

Re: Government Policy on Ada Acquisitions

[Ted Dennison]

In article <1994Sep7.155252.14027@ocsystems.com>, kdh@ocsystems.com (Kevin D. Heatwole) writes:
|> Jim Dorman (aetechca@powergrid.electriciti.com ) writes:
|> > 
|> > The way to ruin a budding commercial enterprise is for the 
|> > government to PAY NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATIONS TO DEVELOP THINGS AND 
|> > THEN GIVE THEM AWAY. For the benefit of those in academia, this is 
|> > how things are actually working. The problem with this approach is 
|> > that it ruins the incentive of industry  to compete. Why should 
|> > Alsys, AETECH or RRS commit $900K to develop and maintain a 
|> > validated $99 Ada9X compiler for academia, when the government 
|> > issues a non-competitive sole-source contract to NYU for $2.5 
|> > million dollars to build a non-validated GNAT compiler from 
|> > scratch to be given away free? 
|> > 
|> 
|> Being an employee of one of the "budding commercial enterprises" in 
|> the Ada industry, I, too, share Jim's concerns (I'd like to remain
|> employed ;-)).  The costs of competing in this environment are very 
|> high (you need a minimum of at least $1 million a year in on-going 
|> revenue if you are even going to think about supporting an Ada 
|> compiler).  That being said, I am still confident in our ability to 
|> compete with any "cheap" compiler, even if it is "of high quality", 
|> but it does make you think twice before entering the game.

I wouldn't worry too much. I implemented a program in Sun (Verdix) Ada 
and then translated it to GNAT (our customer site has no liscence for
Sun Ada). GNAT's executable ran about %20 slower. Any company that 
needs a fast product should be willing to pay a reasonable amount for
a commercial compiler. 

Of course, if your commercial compiler costs more than a >20% faster 
CPU you may still have a problem.

For you legal types, the program made heavy use of floating-point 
math and very heavy use of disk I/O. Neither executable was compiled
with optimizations.

|> One solution might have been to build into the GNAT contract with
|> the government, the restriction that GNAT could not be validated for
|> a specified period (say, until the year 2000), even by an independent 

If this is your worry, worry not. My understanding from reading the gnat
docs is that they NEVER intend to validate gnat.

Re: Government Policy on Ada Acquisitions

[CONDIC]

From: Marin David Condic, 407.796.8997, M/S 731-93
Subject: Re: Government Policy on Ada Acquisitions
Original_To:  PROFS%"SMTP@PWAGPDB"
Original_cc:  CONDIC



On Wed, 7 Sep 1994 19:07:41, Michael Feldman <mfeldman@SEAS.GWU.EDU> wrote:
>
>I have a really wacky, fuzzy-headed academic sort-of idea.
>How 'bout if all the Ada companies who are sitting and bitching about
>the lack of tools, and fighting GNAT at every turn,
>...
>

I couldn't agree more and would like to add that this is
*exactly* the way that C got its start. Remember when ATT was
practically *giving* away UNIX to universities in C source code
along with a C compiler? Didn't that do a lot to make UNIX/C
popular? Eventually (when regulatory problems settled out) ATT
started licensing the technology to just about any computer
company that wanted it and - as I recall - the fees were not so
exhorbitant as to make development from scratch an attractive
proposition.

Now I have no experience with GNAT because nobody has a port for
VAX/VMS yet. (Or is there one, of which I do not know?) Maybe
it's a half-way decent system that needs some polish (value
added) and a support environment (more value added) and some
clever tools (even more value added) That sounds like a way for
someone with some entreprenurial spirit to leverage a large
government investment into a going private concern. (Sort of like
Berkley Unix, XENIX, ULTRIX, etc. etc. etc. All UNIX clones with
value added by some vendor.)

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.)

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.

Anyone out there interested in starting up a venture?


Pax Vobiscum,

Marin

Marin David Condic, Senior Computer Engineer    ATT:        407.796.8997
M/S 731-93                                      Technet:    796.8997
Pratt & Whitney, GESP                           Internet:   CONDICMA@PWFL.COM
P.O. Box 109600                                 Internet:   MDCONDIC@AOL.COM
West Palm Beach, FL 33410-9600                  Internet:   4033121@MCIMAIL.COM
===============================================================================
    "According to my best recollection, I don't remember."

        --  Vincent "Jimmy Blue Eyes" Alo
===============================================================================

Re: Government Policy on Ada Acquisitions

[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
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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."
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Government Policy on Ada Acquisitions

[Bevin R. Brett]

In article <34n3mk$3c8@theopolis.orl.mmc.com>, dennison@romulus23.DAB.GE.COM (Ted Dennison) writes...

>I wouldn't worry too much. I implemented a program in Sun (Verdix) Ada 
>and then translated it to GNAT (our customer site has no liscence for
>Sun Ada). GNAT's executable ran about %20 slower.
...
>For you legal types, the program made heavy use of floating-point 
>math and very heavy use of disk I/O. Neither executable was compiled
>with optimizations.


It is REALLY SILLY to compare the execution times produced by two different
compilers for the same platform WITHOUT TURNING ON THE OPTIMISER!

All you are doing is measuring what the two different compiler teams thought
should done in the NoOptimise, and this bears NO RELATION AT ALL to the
quality of code that they will generate with the optimiser enabled.

Such poor benchmarking techniques, followed by the wide dissemination of the
results, are a major source of false information in the computer business.  It
is being practised by individuals, companies, and even trade magazines; and all
it does is cause totally bogus impressions of machines, languages, and compilers
to become "common knowlege".

/Bevin

Re: Government Policy on Ada Acquisitions

[Michael Feldman]

In article <1994Sep8.131449.15952@ocsystems.com>,
Oliver E. Cole <oec@ocsystems.com> wrote:
>Michael Feldman (mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu ) writes:
>
>   [snip]
>
>> 
>> How 'bout if all the Ada companies who are sitting and bitching about
>> the lack of tools, and fighting GNAT at every turn, 
>   
>  [snip]
>
>   OCS welcomes the gnat effort and has cooperated with Robert early on,
>giving him the experience of our efforts connecting Ada front ends
>to C backends.  Please do not lump all "Ada companies" together.

I didn't mean to lump all the Ada companies together, just all the ones
that are bitching about GNAT. :-)
>
>   We realize that to survive we need to be better than the competition and
>gnat is part of that competition.  No animosity, no complaining, just
>rededicated to the task of making the best Ada stuff on earth.

Now THAT's what I like to hear! I think our mood would be a lot better if
we heard the same commitment from other vendors, instead of tirades and
veiled threats and accusations of communism, etc.

Mike Feldman
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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."
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Government Policy on Ada Acquisitions

[Ted Dennison]

In article <34nmfo$mpi@jac.zko.dec.com>, brett@ada9x.enet.dec.com (Bevin R. Brett) writes:
|> 
|> In article <34n3mk$3c8@theopolis.orl.mmc.com>, dennison@romulus23.DAB.GE.COM (Ted Dennison) writes...
|> 
|> >I wouldn't worry too much. I implemented a program in Sun (Verdix) Ada 
|> >and then translated it to GNAT (our customer site has no liscence for
|> >Sun Ada). GNAT's executable ran about %20 slower.
|> ...
|> >For you legal types, the program made heavy use of floating-point 
|> >math and very heavy use of disk I/O. Neither executable was compiled
|> >with optimizations.
|> 
|> 
|> It is REALLY SILLY to compare the execution times produced by two different
|> compilers for the same platform WITHOUT TURNING ON THE OPTIMISER!
|> 
|> Such poor benchmarking techniques, followed by the wide dissemination of the
|> results, are a major source of false information in the computer business.  It
|> is being practised by individuals, companies, and even trade magazines; and all
|> it does is cause totally bogus impressions of machines, languages, and compilers
|> to become "common knowlege".
|> 

Well, Bevin it could have been worse; I could have left out that information
altogether. I purposely mentioned the level of optimization I used so that
those more knowlegeable than I (and you CERTAINLY qualify) would be able 
to judge the validity of these figures. 

However, since GNAT is still unfinished, wouldn't it be MORE unfair to compare
its optimized code to the code produced by a commercial compiler that has fully
matured optimization capabilities? Perhaps someone associted with the GNAT project
could correct me on this point if I'm wrong. I'm sure you are absolutely correct
as far as comparing two COMMERCIAL compilers.

A far bigger problem with my numbers is that they are just ONE data point. There
is no evidence that a different application might not run 20% faster compiled 
under GNAT. 

I suspect the IO packages I used are the main speed culprit, not the compiler
optimizations. The Sun Ada IO packages appear to be much more complicated 
and low-level than the ones I used under GNAT.

T.E.D.

Re: Government Policy on Ada Acquisitions

[david.c.willett]

From article <34pq9h$b87@theopolis.orl.mmc.com>, by dennison@romulus23.DAB.GE.COM (Ted Dennison):
> In article <34nmfo$mpi@jac.zko.dec.com>, brett@ada9x.enet.dec.com (Bevin R. Brett) writes:
> |> 
	{Ted's number deleted}

> |> It is REALLY SILLY to compare the execution times produced by two different
> |> compilers for the same platform WITHOUT TURNING ON THE OPTIMISER!
> |> 
> |> Such poor benchmarking techniques, followed by the wide dissemination of the
> |> results, are a major source of false information in the computer business.  It
> |> is being practised by individuals, companies, and even trade magazines; and all
> |> it does is cause totally bogus impressions of machines, languages, and compilers
> |> to become "common knowlege".
> |> 
> 
> Well, Bevin it could have been worse; I could have left out that information
> altogether. I purposely mentioned the level of optimization I used so that
> those more knowlegeable than I (and you CERTAINLY qualify) would be able 
> to judge the validity of these figures. 
> 
> However, since GNAT is still unfinished, wouldn't it be MORE unfair to compare
> its optimized code to the code produced by a commercial compiler that has fully
> matured optimization capabilities? Perhaps someone associted with the GNAT project
> could correct me on this point if I'm wrong. I'm sure you are absolutely correct
> as far as comparing two COMMERCIAL compilers.
> 
> A far bigger problem with my numbers is that they are just ONE data point. There
> is no evidence that a different application might not run 20% faster compiled 
> under GNAT. 
> 
> I suspect the IO packages I used are the main speed culprit, not the compiler
> optimizations. The Sun Ada IO packages appear to be much more complicated 
> and low-level than the ones I used under GNAT.
> 
> T.E.D.

In a (perhaps futile) effort to nip this thread before it becomes ridiculous,
let me suggest that benchmarks are valid only within the context in which 
they are originally measured.  That is to say, each development shop needs 
to make and interpret their own benchmarks if the numbers are to have any 
real value.

Both Bevin and Ted are correct, in my opinion, but the real lesson here is

	"Don't let anyone else make your tradeoffs for you."  

The only way to know how a tool set is going to perform for *you* in 
*your* development environment is to install it in that enviroment, do a 
spanning subset of whatever it is you do, and measure its performance.

One final point, there are many factors which can be used to select a 
compiler.  To my mind, the efficiency of the generated code on a particular
platform is one of the lesser ones.  It is far more important to me that 
the compiler help my programmers develop high quality (readable, 
maintainable, etc.) source than it is that the compiler squeeze the last 
gram of performance out of the hardware.  Of course, your mileage may vary.


<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Dave Willett          AT&T Advanced Technology Systems
                      Greensboro, NC USA

When short, simple questions have long, complex answers -- your 
organization's in trouble.

	Adapted from "In Search of Excellence"

Re: Government Policy on Ada Acquisitions

[Richard Kenner]

In article <34pq9h$b87@theopolis.orl.mmc.com> dennison@romulus23.DAB.GE.COM (Ted Dennison) writes:
>However, since GNAT is still unfinished, wouldn't it be MORE unfair to compare
>its optimized code to the code produced by a commercial compiler that has
>fully matured optimization capabilities? Perhaps someone associted with the
>GNAT project could correct me on this point if I'm wrong. I'm sure you are
>absolutely correct as far as comparing two COMMERCIAL compilers.

Well, I don't know what's "fair" here, but I strongly agree with
Bevin's point: it's not a very meaningful comparison.  At the code
generation level, few compiler writers bother to worry about the
quality of unoptimized code.  GNAT uses the GCC backend, where -O
certainly does something.

Re: Government Policy on Ada Acquisitions

[Robert Dewar]

It is true that GNAT is not finished, but it is using the GCC backend which is
(a) quite mature at this point and
(b) highly optimizing

If you write a chunk of Ada code that is essentially equivalent to some C code,
and of course you turn on the optimizer (-O2), you get code that is equivalent
to what you would get from C, which means in practice very good, comparable to
the best C compilers around. Someone at the London SigAda remarked to me that
he was amazed at the Whetstone performance of GNAT, "it was essentially the
same as C". I would have been amazed if this were NOT the case.

Now Ada 9X specific stuff, such as aggregates, pointers to unconstrained arrays,etc. is still quite unoptimizied. The performance of GNAT is by no means terrible
for such things, but it can be greatly improved. Right now, that kind of
optimization is of course low priority for us.

Similarly, the library packages can stand a lot of improvement. Until the most
recent release, Text_IO was checking (with a system call) for the console case
on every character. That was really a bug, but not one that showed up as a
functionality problem in our tests. That bug iis now fixed, but there may
well be other similar performance problems.

In any case, running GCC unoptimized and reporting its performance is quite
ludicrous and gives no useful hints at all about the real performance of
GNAT code. The compiler itself is always generated using -O2. It would not
occur to us to leave optimization off. Similarly all our test programs are
typically run using -O2. Indeed it is often the case that the compiler is
more reliable with optimization turned on, simply because that's the way
people run it for any real code.

Re: Government Policy on Ada Acquisitions

[Mark Bayern]

 
In article <9409081234.AA07258@eurocontrol.de>, Bob Wells #402 (wel@EUROCONTROL.DE) writes:
>Jim Dorman/Thomes <aetechca@powergrid.electriciti.com> wrote:
>
>> What will be the benefits of the proliferation of free non-
>> validated, partially implemented, non-supported, un-maintained Ada
>> compilers and libraries? I believe we can logically expect the
>> same kind of razor-sharp support from NYU as we get from the Post
>> Office.
>>
>
>G'day,
>All I can say is that after getting two copies of your demo disk, both
>of which didn't work, I not so sure about the razor-sharp support found
>in *some* non-socialist compiler vendors.
>Bob W. (-:
>

Well, I got support from AETECH a few years ago.  Only after
calling and complaining loudly that the stuff I bought simply
didn't work, and the documentation wasn't even consistient on a
single page!  Turned out that the formal definition of the
function didn't match the example given on the same page, and the
compiler didn't like either one!  AETECH ended up sending me the
source code for the package specs so I could see how to code the
call. 

I'll take GNU's 'support' any day over what I've gotten from some
commercial vendors.  (Alsys is good, but does cost big $$'s)

Mark