From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.8 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_DATE autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,ffce418d7a49585f X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 1994-09-16 10:55:54 PST Path: bga.com!news.sprintlink.net!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!psinntp!cmcl2!thecourier.cims.nyu.edu!thecourier.cims.nyu.edu!nobody From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Vendor bashing? Sort of. Date: 15 Sep 1994 09:28:56 -0400 Organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences Message-ID: <359i6o$lja@gnat.cs.nyu.edu> References: <355o58$isa@felix.seas.gwu.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: gnat.cs.nyu.edu Date: 1994-09-15T09:28:56-04:00 List-Id: 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!]