Ada policy

[Laurent GUERBY]

On Tue, 2004-08-31 at 20:10, 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.  

Thanks for the precision (was not clear to me).

> 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.

That's not the point, it's practical to write large complex software
in Ada (I worked on "porting" n-million lines Ada application from
compilers and platforms without much trouble except long compile time on
old 16MB of RAM machines for software of such size :).

It's just that GNAT people choose to take advantage of non portable
feature they added as they saw fit since it had no practical drawback
(given the cross compilation abilities of GCC). 

This kind of liberty is only available for compiler writers that are
able to "bootstrap", and not for software in general, so no general
conclusion should be taken there :).

Laurent