Date: Thu, 16 Mar 1995 16:09:21 -0500 (CDT)
From: Aaron Ucko <UCKO AT VAX1 DOT ROCKHURST DOT EDU>
Subject: Re: Ada and djgpp
To: mfeldman AT seas DOT gwu DOT edu
Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Organization: Rockhurst College; Kansas City, MO

>> >I am very excited about GNAT and the (upcoming) validation testing.  I
>> >am sorry to hear that (as I read in the documentation) the DOS version
>> >does not support tasking.  I hope that is rectified soon.  Dos will be
>> >my primary Ada platform for a while.
>> 
>> You must be one heck of an optimist.  DOS was designed from the ground up
>> to be unitasking (monotasking?), and making it anything else is nontrivial.
>> 
>That's a real oversimplification. Let me try to explain; kill this note if
>a digression into tasking and language issues would bore you.:-)
>
>While it is true that DOS itself is not multitasking, it is quite possible 
>to build a multitasking system on top of DOS. Indeed, for the last eight 
>years or so, Ada compilers for DOS - fully validated, from roughly 4 different 
>suppliers - have been able to do Ada-level tasking and many quite successful
>applications have been fielded, in and out of the government. 

Sorry about my reply; I didn't realize that Ada did its own multitasking
rather than relying on fork() and some form of IPC.  Sounds like a rather
interesting language, then; perhaps I'll put it on my list of things to
investigate.

--- Aaron Ucko (ucko AT vax1 DOT rockhurst DOT edu; finger for PGP public key) | httyp!
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