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Re: Ada policy
Zack Weinberg wrote:
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.
You have a strange way of jumping to extremely odd conclusions.
No one ever said that it is not practical to write a large complex
piece of software in standard Ada, and yet you conclude from our
quite deliberate choice here that this is not practical.
Of course it would be possible to write GNAT is standard Ada, but
since we decided long ago that the only requirement is that it
be able to compile itself, we might as well take advantage of the
many implementation dependent extra features in GNAT to improve
the quality and readabiity of the compiler.
[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.]
It's FAR easier to write within the confines of the Ada standard than
the C standard since it is a much more flexible language. Just one
example, in C there is no way of precisely specifying the layout of
data, e.g. bit packed arrays. Zack, I have a feeling you don't know
Ada that well :-) :-)