Re: Will the World ever see something beyond GNAT 3.15p?

[Georg Bauhaus <sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de>]

Jerry Petrey <jdpetreyAPPENDIX@raytheon.com> wrote:
: 
: 
: Bernd Specht wrote:
: 
:> Ada community seems full of advocats, but technicians are missing.

Where would you place them when it comes to making the decision
which compiler to supply for a hardware offering?

:> Those wise guys always stating that you have to read thousands of documents
:> and working years on things you are not interessted in, then build your own
:> toolchains, are responsible for decreasing Ada-use.
 
: I?m afraid you are right.  I think Ada is the best language for most
: applications today except for the lack of support and tools.  I have been using
: it exclusively for the last 15 years and have been fortunate to find good
: paying jobs using it but the handwriting is definitely on the wall for this to
: come to an end.  We have enough big programs at Raytheon using Ada to keep me
: busy until I retire in a few years but none of our new programs will even
: consider using Ada.  Most of our new engineers either have never heard of it or
: consider it a relic from the past and want nothing to do with it.  Like some of
: the other posters said ? when you?re looking for a compiler for a certain
: language, you want to have some complete, well supported and easy to use
: choices ? not have to build them yourself.

AFAICT, GPS is well supported, and part of the delivery in the
academic program that has started recently.
The situation with SPARK is similar, I believe.
ObjectAda is supported as well, at various levels.
I don't think that Ada's public visibility has a lot to do with
supported toolsets.
(Seems like there are similar stories of regret about Eiffel (and other
languages). You can get a sufficiently impressive IDE for Eifel, you can
get integration with the numerically most popular IDE on the
numerically most popular OS. You get all this for free. Still...)

You'd have to change professors, or history, and fashion, perhaps write a
killer application in Ada (maybe not a killing application, which could
be considered less popular :-) Like:
"MySQL is currently being rewritten in Ada 2005".

There have been rumors that Ada for .NET is being interated into
Visual Studio. Aonix is apparently integrating their compiler
with Eclipse.  Will this change anything? A recent discussion
somewhere else that insisted on C-like syntax for language design makes
me think otherwise.

For example, if I look at the language D (available from
digitalmars.com), I feel very much at home because almost all
of the language D is already available in Ada. OTOH, all the
programmers preferring curly braces appear to feel at home as
well, because of the curly braces, and because of the cool
new features they hadn't known before. No need for them to "go
back" to languages of the past, no need to consider whether the
pals will still like them if they did "go back" ;-)


-- Georg