Date: Thu, 16 Mar 95 10:14:38 PST
From: KUBLER AT MASS DOT dnet DOT hac DOT com
To: ARPA:@sun.soe.clarkson.edu, hac2arpa DOT hac DOT com AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
PP-Warning: Parse error in original version of preceding line
Original-To: ARPA::"djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu"@hac2arpa.hac.com

> Mike Feldman said:
>
>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.

I am a [former] user who found it unusable on either Solaris or DOS.
GNAT would not compile Ada applications, either dieing or telling me
about unimplemented features.  Finally I tried compiling PIWG's to at
least get performance data.  GNAT failed there too, among other 
problems, it didn't support the attributes of DURATION, my memory tells
me that GNAT supported fixed point with floating point implementation. 
A colleague of mine returned from a presentation of Mr. Dewar very
enthusiastic about GNAT and its projected March 95 validation.  I 
offered to bet him a dollar a day for every day over (me) or under (him)
that deadline.  (He declined)

I deleted all the GNAT modules on my DOS machine but I kept the DJGPP
support because I found I could do real work with C and C++. 

>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).

But the compiler isn't multitasking(?), so that feature will never
be self-tested.  Not to mention representation_clause, etc, maybe 10%
of Ada95 will be tested.

>The GNAT Team expects to be able to validate (using the government-
>sponsored validation suite) in the summer.

What host and target?
Validation is target and host specific, I expect without tasking the
DOS version will _never_ be validated.  A co-worker told me GNAT will
never be validated because commercial vendors object to the sponsored
competition.  

Douglas C. Kubler
kubler AT mass DOT dnet DOT hac DOT com         
My opinions are my own.