From: Michael Feldman <mfeldman AT seas DOT gwu DOT edu>
Subject: Re: DOS multi-tasking, Ada and djgpp]
To: turnbull AT shako DOT sk DOT tsukuba DOT ac DOT jp (Stephen Turnbull)
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 1995 13:24:00 -0500 (EST)
Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu


> Somebody has to own the hardware.  That is going to be the operating
> system, and this means that every time you access the floppy disk (for
> example) the system is going to drop dead, since DOS not only isn't
> multi-tasking, it's not reentrant, so you can't access more than one
> DOS service simultaneously.  Yes, it's possible to get around this
> (basically by writing your own drivers for all the hardware you need
> to access), but you may as well install Linux or *BSD if you want a
> general-purpose solution.

Indeed. Our main interest is to provide an acceptable GNAT Ada tasking
runtime, mostly for educational purposes. More serious Ada developers
will no doubt be moving on to more serious platforms, if they are doing
lots of tasking. OTOH, serious apps _have_ been written using commercial
Ada 83 compilers on DOS, tasking and all.

Mike Feldman