[9fans] Ada for Plan9 yet?

[9fans] Ada for Plan9 yet?

[Mário Amado Alves]

I'm considering installing Plan 9.

However I would like to know in advance if it supports the Ada
language, notably the GNAT system (AdaPower.Com is currently the
starting point for information on Ada and GNAT).

After browsing the archives I found some 2-year old (difficult to
follow) threads about this. They seem to indicate a negative answer.
But maybe I misunderstood, or things have evolved since then.

Thanks a lot,
--MAA

[9fans] Re: Ada for Plan9 yet?

[Douglas A. Gwyn]

Mário Amado Alves wrote:
> However I would like to know in advance if it supports the Ada
> language, ...

One would really need a whole environment, and so far as
I am aware nobody using Plan 9 has sufficient interest
in supporting Ada.  Remember, Plan 9 is a research tool,
not a DoD-product platform.

Re: [9fans] Re: Ada for Plan9 yet?

[boyd, rounin]

M�rio Amado Alves wrote:
> However I would like to know in advance if it supports the Ada
> language, ...

so we need an asteroid to squish a bug?

[9fans] Re: Ada for Plan9 yet?

[Mário Amado Alves]

> One would really need a whole environment, and so far as
> I am aware nobody using Plan 9 has sufficient interest
> in supporting Ada.

Nobody *developing* Plan 9, maybe. Users exist, and surely people
atracted to Plan 9, who happen to be Adaists. I hope there is no
language 'politics' going on around Plan 9.

> Remember, Plan 9 is a research tool,
> not a DoD-product platform.

Wrong assumption? Ada is on the 'desktop' now. I am myself a
researcher (in computer science). My lab currently runs a Linux LAN.
Some Windows on laptops. I see Plan 9 as a solution to many system
administration and hardware allocation problems we currently have.
Languages we use are Ada, C, Prolog, R, and others. I'll try a small
Plan 9 installation soon and see how far I can get compiling GNAT or
another free Ada compiler on it. I suspect the only big problem that
may arise is in the area of concurrency, as I think GNAT uses a thread
library to implement Ada tasks, and Plan 9 has a different scheme. On
the other hand, I see Plan 9 as a much better environment to implement
the DSA (Distributed Systems Annex), Ada distributed computing
features. (Even WRT the threads, from what I've read so far, it seems
easy to map Linux threads to Plan 9 processes which BTW I also find a
better concurrency scheme, actually also more in line with Ada's
concurrency model.)

Thanks,
--Marius

Re: [9fans] Re: Ada for Plan9 yet?

[Mário Amado Alves]

> > However I would like to know in advance if it supports the Ada
> > language, ...
>
> so we need an asteroid to squish a bug?

What bug?

<<The OS support manager  was a big C fan and dead set against Ada.
He showed lots of charts that indicated that when repairing STARS (bug
reports) on the C projects turnaround was twice as fast as with
assembler, and the cost per report was a third less.  "What about the
Ada projects?" he was asked by the
division manager.

"Oh, we don't know what it costs to fix bugs in the Ada systems.
There
haven't been any reported."  To this day, I don't think he understands
why everyone present started laughing uncontrollably.>> (R.I.Eachus,
on comp.lang.ada)

Now less jestly, I recommend updating your perception of Ada:

  http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/myths.html

And please note I AM NOT PUSHING ADA ON ANYONE, C was my first true
love, so please no language flames.

--Marius

Re: [9fans] Re: Ada for Plan9 yet?

[boyd, rounin]

> And please note I AM NOT PUSHING ADA ON ANYONE, C was my first true
> love, so please no language flames.

the James J. Angleton 'hall of mirrors' ...

Re: [9fans] Re: Ada for Plan9 yet?

[boyd, rounin]

> Nobody *developing* Plan 9, maybe. Users exist, and surely people
> atracted to Plan 9, who happen to be Adaists.

ROLFV

Re: [9fans] Re: Ada for Plan9 yet?

[boyd, rounin]

> i believe you'd need to push Ada rather than pull it to port it,
> since the Ada front end is written in Ada.

reminds me of this thing called Tex; tangle & weave &  the P word

Re: [9fans] Re: Ada for Plan9 yet?

[C H Forsyth]

i believe you'd need to push Ada rather than pull it to port it,
since the Ada front end is written in Ada.  in other words, i believe
you need a working GNAT cross-compiling for Plan 9 on
some other system to bootstrap it.  that makes it trickier,
unless the cross-compilation environment for Plan 9 from Unix
is in the Plan 9 gcc package.