Re: Vendor bashing? Sort of.

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Note also that the complaints about pricing of Ada products have also often
been made with a very narrow viewpoint (i.e. what C costs). In fact decent
COBOL compilers for example, with tools, have always cost about $3000 on
the PC, and still do!

It is true that C brought down the price level for compilers in general (and
in the process made it VERY difficult for anyone to make money making
compilers for anything -- there are a lot of good C compilers scattered
by the roadside!)

I think the main reason that (some) Ada tools were not better was simply
a lack of resources, so when Mike complains that the vendors blew it by
not providing better tools, he has to have an idea of where the resources
would have come from. There are two possibilities:

o  Vendors spent money on something else, which they should not have
This is hard to see, Mike if you think this, what do you have in mind.

o  If only Ada had been pricede at $100 (or some other low figure), the market
was so elastic (elasticity >> 1.0) that they would have made a ton of money
and been able to fund all sorts of stuff. If you believe that you are in my
opinion a card carrying member of the land of Oz, or some other fantasy world.

In fact there was a relatively huge amount of capital injected into the
Ada market, some of which did indeed generate some very good tools (e.g.
the support of hardware emulators that Alsys provides, or the Rational
APex environment), and my guess is that the *only* reason that this money
was available was the mandate. A possible exception is the support of
French banks for Alsys, which might well have been based on being sold
more generally on the future of Ada [of course the banks lost all their 
money, so in retrospect, they certainly made a bad investment decision].

My own view is that the critical thing is for Ada NOT to rely on inventing
its own tools, but instead to concentrate on being able to take advantage
of tools for other languages that already exist. Now with my GNAT hat on,
one of the very important aspects of GNAT is that its compilation model,
an commitment to system standards (calling sequences, debugging information,
object module formats etc) make taking advantage of existing tools a lot
easier, and I would certainly like to see other Ada compilers move in the
same direction (good ideas in GNAT are free for the taking. A number of
vendors are still afraid of even reading GNAT sources because they are
afraid of contaminating themselves by doing so -- that's silly, but there
is only so much effort that I am willing to put in trying to convince other
vendors to take advantage of GNAT in this way :-) Incidentally, this doesn't
apply to all vendors, some of whom are looking VERY closely at GNAT and
definitely copying our ideas, which we find most pleasing. [I know that
sounds strange to people more accustomed to locking up their sources in
a safe with armed guards, but free software is another world!]