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Re: Ada policy
Laurent GUERBY <laurent@guerby.net> writes:
> On Tue, 2004-08-31 at 16:39, Gabriel Dos Reis wrote:
>> I think you could reason on facts: the C front-end!
>
> I'd say not relevant, the Ada subset used by GNAT is much more
> complex than C. Also as soon as bootstrap was complete, GNAT code
> started using Ada 9x features and there was no other Ada 9x compiler
> to help with portability problems, which was clearly not the
> situation for C.
And the C language seems to cater more for portability across
different implementations, too (with conditional compilation and the
like).
People seem to be reacting way out of proportion to this particular
observation. There's good solid engineering reasons why you need GNAT
to build GNAT and I don't mean to second-guess that. When I say I'm
disappointed, that's an abstract observation on the state of the Ada
language -- if it's not practical to write a large complex piece of
software such as a compiler in the language as standardized, then the
standard is less than useful, and that's disappointing.
[It's debatable whether it's practical to write a large complex piece
of software in the C language as ISO-standardized, but at least it's
possible to do so in the /de facto/ standard language.]
zw