Mail Archives: djgpp/1995/03/15/20:29:49
>
> I have received quite a bit of mail lately about the GNAT product. I
> didn't realize there were so many people who wanted to use Ada along
> with C++.
There are lots!
>
> If you look at sw-eng.falls-church.va.us there are several directories
> of Ada related material (from Ada 83 to Ada 9X) including the Language
> Reference Manual (LRM) and Annotated LRM. Highly recommended.
Also see my .sig regarding WWW sites.
>
> I have not had time to do much more than run the tests but I expect
> that in the next month I will do some more extensive testing (I hope).
I've been using GNAT extensively on Solaris, DOS, and OS/2. It is a
very nice piece of work. It will be completed by summer; it is
_quite_ usable now. I follow discussions about C++ templates with
great interest; Ada has had working templates for 10 years, and GNAT
does them fine too. No tasking yet on DOS, but we are working on
that here at GW now.
Also, GNAT is about 250k lines of (mostly) Ada 95, (a bit of C around
the edges) so its writers get a lot of opportunity to test the compiler
on itself! GNAT has been compiling itself since July 1993, and its own
sources contain more and more of the Ada 95 extensions with each new
release (new releases about once a month now).
[snip]
> I just wanted to pass on the information for anyone else who would
> like to experiment with a very promising Ada 9X compiler. I think it
> is great that we have, in essence, first crack at a language -- even
> before the commercial world jumps into the fray. (Of course the
> standard has yet to be finalized, so the commercial world will
> probably catch up soon after that happens).
Just a small correction - the first Ada standard was adopted in 1983,
incorporating such things as generic templates, exceptions, operator
overloading, and language-defined multitasking. There are validated Ada 83
compilers for every platform one could imagine, mostly commercial.
The _revised_ Ada standard was officially published by ISO on Feb. 15,
1995, so Ada 95 is official. It is an ISO, an ANSI, and a FIPS
(Federal Information Processing Standard) standard. The revision
adds the rest of OOP to the language - type extension, dynamic
polymorphism (Ada 83 has static), etc.
The U.S. DoD, which has been the sponsor of Ada 83 and Ada 95, and in
fact has funded most of the GNAT development, maintains its commitment
to Ada but prefers _not_ to stamp Ada 95 with a "military standard" label;
better for it to be simply a commercial standard, as it is now.
The GNAT Team expects to be able to validate (using the government-
sponsored validation suite) in the summer. I realize this is mainly
a DOS group, but you might be interested to know that Silicon Graphics
has made a significant commitment to both Ada in general and GNAT in
particular. I have heard SGI folks rave about Ada's multitasking stuff
in doing their animation and virtual-reality work. They have stated that
their interest is not especially government-related, rather they think
that GNAT will help them sell hardware. I've seen some very spectacular
video-game-type demos mixing Ada and C++.
Sorry for the digression - back to djgpp. :-)
Mike Feldman
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Michael B. Feldman - chair, SIGAda Education Working Group
Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The George Washington University - Washington, DC 20052 USA
202-994-5919 (voice) - 202-994-0227 (fax) - mfeldman AT seas DOT gwu DOT edu (Internet)
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One, two, three ways an underdog: Ada fan, Mac fan, Old Liberal Democrat
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Ada on the WWW: http://lglwww.epfl.ch/Ada/ or http://info.acm.org/sigada/
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