Re: Anybody in US using ADA ? New language competition? (long)

["Marin David Condic" <mcondic.auntie.spam@acm.org>]

Obviously, you can't speak for all vendors, but you could speak for at least
*one* vendor. :-) (Probably, you also talk to most of the other ones with
your involvement in other areas of Ada.) Would there be any sympathy on the
part of the vendors (or RR Software?) to get some sort of "Conventional Ada
Library" going under the auspices of SIGAda? Would there be some willingness
on the part of the vendors (or RR Software) to distribute such a library?

SIGAda probably would be a good place to get some kind of development
package put together from things on the net. Selecting some things (like a
database product?) would be difficult because you'd want it to work on
several platforms and everyone is going to have a favorite, but it might be
possible to do that relatively quickly. (Version 1 doesn't have to have
*everything* in it - just a good start.) You're right about it being work to
make sure it compiles across most of the compilers out there, but
realistically, its a job that could get done if there were enough volunteers
willing to take a package and run it against what they've got. If a disk
were produced, SIGAda might even be able to raise some funds by selling it
for some small fee.

But again, I think it would have a better chance of success if the vendors
were to get behind it and at minimum put their imprimatur on it. If they
don't want to distribute it, they should at least push it as the
"recommended" package. Obviously, I think it would be better if they
packaged it with their compilers, complete with precompiled object code, but
that could raise some support issues.

MDC
--
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Marin David Condic
I work for: http://www.belcan.com/
My project is: http://www.jast.mil/

Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ a c m . o r g

    "I'd trade it all for just a little more"
        --  Charles Montgomery Burns, [4F10]
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Randy Brukardt <randy@rrsoftware.com> wrote in message
news:v1m9qg4r8m8la7@corp.supernews.com...
>
>
> I can't speak for the vendors, of course. As far as the standards body
> goes, that's where the idea originated (inside of WG9). SigAda
> volunteered to try to implement it, because it is out of scope for WG9.
> The hope is that some of the packages pseudo-standardized by SigAda
> could be picked up and added to the standard in the future.
>
> I suspect that getting the vendors to do anything will be a hard sell.
> The idea as I recall it (I wasn't at either the recent SigAda meeting or
> the most recent WG9 meeting, so the plan may have changed) was to set up
> a place where "certified packages" could be accessed. Such software
> would already have been tested on a variety of compilers, so it ought to
> work out of the box for you. Java supposedly has something similar.
>
> The problem with most of the stuff on the net is that it has only been
> tested with whatever compiler the author has. And it often doesn't work
> anywhere else. Our experience with Claw is that you really have to
> compile and test it on each compiler if it does anything interesting at
> all, because some things won't work, and some compilers have bugs that
> allow illegal code to be compiled, and so on. If this stuff works well
> and is popular, the vendors will pick up on it.
>
>                    Randy.
>
>
>