Re: DEC Ada for Alpha Computers

[weber@lglsun.epfl.ch (Mats Weber)]

In article <1994Sep15.121515.24609@sei.cmu.edu>
lpb@sei.cmu.edu (Loic Briand) writes:

> The problem is that the debugger needs to have a couple of specific features
> implemented for each language. It looks like they were not implemented for Ada
> (as they were not implemented if I remember correctly in the first versions
> of DEC Ada/VMS). Note also that the debugger is working great with C.

> is it realistic to hope that DEC will ever fix the problem? If yes, when? 
> Is there any alternate solution available today? (I know that Verdix--I mean
> Rational has plans for Ada/Alpha but this it not available yet).

I woudn't expect any vendor to fix debugger problems, at least no to a
satisfactory level. I have seen no Ada debugger correctly handling
programs with many generics and tasks. I have been participating in the
development of a project with approx. 100 KLOC, and we have almost
never been able to use a debugger to find the bugs.

Note that this comment should not be taken as Ada bashing. Developping
a debugger for Ada is much harder than for many other languages. And
despite all the tracing we have had to add by hand to our code, I still
wouldn't use any other language for a project of this size.