[Info-vax] September 6, 2016 - new Roadmap and State of the Port updates now on VSI website

[Simon Clubley]

On 2016-09-08, Stephen Davies <joviangm at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday, 7 September 2016 19:51:30 UTC+1, Simon Clubley  wrote:
>
>> I see Ada still has a question mark against it. It looks like that's
>> still causing some discussions internally. :-)
>
> Surely it couldn't have been that hard to port the existing DEC Ada '83 front
> end to IA64 and now to x64? Ok, many modern developers will want all those
> fancy tagged types and stuff but there must be a few other users who could
> have managed without them (though maybe add "use type", read 'out' parameters,
> explicit indefinite generic parameters, etc at some point?). Alas, most Ada
> development where I work has already migrated to Windows.

You can't start throwing various bits at random into some Frankenstein
Ada 83+ compiler. :-) You need to be able to tell people that you are
selling them an Ada 83, Ada 95, or a later Ada compiler.

Even if someone does all the work to port DEC Ada, that still only gets
you an Ada 83 compiler which is only good enough for the older projects
using it.

If that was enough for the VMS Ada community, then DEC and then HP
would not have arranged for Adacore to port GNAT to VMS.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world