Re: ACT announces availability of GNAT 3.14p

[Leon Winslow <leon.winslow@eliminatespam.notes.udayton.edu>]

Robert Dewar wrote:

> Ada Core Technologies (ACT) has made available at the NYU
> site (ftp://cs.nyu.edu/pub/gnat) GNAT 3.14p builds for the
> following targets:
>
> MS Windows (NT/2K)
> Sparc Solaris (2.5.1 through 2.8)
> GNU Linux (Redhat 6.2)
>
> The above are the official platforms, but in practice the
> NT version works reasonable well on Win 98 and Win ME and
> other versions of GNU Linux including Debian GNU/Linux are
> known to be compatible with this version of GNAT.
>
> These are the only public versions that ACT plans to build.
> As always, the releases contain the full sources, and we
> invite volunteers to create builds for other platforms.  We
> also draw attention to the availability of source snapshots
> for the current development version of GNAT (similar to the
> 3.15 release, but on GCC 3, rather than GCC 2).  The above
> public versions are still based on ACT's 2.8.1 GCC version.
>
> These versions are provided without any warranty or
> guarantee of any kind, and no support of any kind is
> available for these public versions from ACT.  They are
> provided as a service for use by students, hobbyists and
> researchers who need access to a high quality Ada 95
> system.
>
> handling

I can understand the reason for limiting ACTs work to Windows NT, but
this is also one of the  reason that Ada is "sliding into oblivion."
The majority of the programming is being done on Windows platforms other
than NT and 2K.  (MS has already announced dates for dropping all suport
of these two platforms.).  A compiler that works "reasonably well" in
W98, XP or Me is never going to be used on those platforms for any
serious work.

Alas, I knew Ada well and hate to see it go down hill, but ....

Lee Winslow