Re: Ada policy

[Zack Weinberg <zack at codesourcery dot com>]

kenner@vlsi1.ultra.nyu.edu (Richard Kenner) writes:

>     This discussion is about appearances as well as actuality.  Can you at
>     least agree that a reasonable person could reach my position?  That is,
>     maybe ACT has never actually broken using an older GCC to bootstrap
>     the Ada front end, but can you understand how I and others have come
>     to the conclusion that your policy was not to keep it working?
>
> You have the quantifiers wrong.  The statement was that there was no
> *guarantee* that it would work with older version, that there was
> the need for freedom to allow it not to work with arbitrarily old
> versions.

Yes, you and Robert keep saying that that is what you said.  Prior
experience indicates that I put the cost-benefit break point in a
different place from you, but I'm not planning to argue about it
except in the unlikely event that it actually bites me (again).

What I am trying to get across, though, is that reasonable people
could - did - read something different in the messages that I quoted.
Understand them to mean that compiling GNAT from GCC 3.x with
something other than GNAT from GCC 3.(x-1) had a very high probability
of not working, and further that this was not considered a bug, or
even an inconvenience.

That is a little different from 'a deliberate policy of breaking
source compatibility between releases', I admit.  I think that a
reasonable person could reach that conclusion too, but only having
read messages which I remember reading but cannot presently find in
the archives.

zw