[9fans] Re: Ada for Plan9 yet?

["Mário Amado Alves" <maa@liacc.up.pt>]

> 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