Ada on Personal Computers – Some Experiences

This paper is the result of a series of rather frustrating experiences we had to make during the last years when experimenting with several Ada systems for personal computers. We report on some aspects of com¬mercially available Ada systems (especially JANUS Ada and Meridian Ada), give examples of compiler pit¬falls and errors in the generated object code, discuss linker and debugger problems, severe restrictions and poor system efficiency. Finally, and perhaps most interesting in the context of Ada, we speculate about the level of "quality" the user may expect from the mere fact that a compiler is validated and summarize our experiences which have shown that the Ada systems we report about cannot cope with our expectations of "professional" systems generating "production quality" programs.