Bakin@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA ("David S. Bakin") (06/06/86)
I've already corresponding privately with Tom, but for those of you who are handing by your fingernails wondering about tasking and Alsys Ada: In Alsys PC AT Ada you get a choice between using predefined libraries that support tasking, and one that doesn't. The latter is meant to be used to satisfy users who don't want to use tasking in a particular program and don't want to pay the space penalty (not too bad in any event) in the runtime system for tasking. Anyway, version 1.0, currently shipping, has a bug in that it doesn't gracefully tell the user he is compiling tasking constructs into a non-tasking library. In fact, it will get one of several different internal errors, as reported by Tom. The solution is to recompile after recreating the library as a tasking library. Version 1.2, shipping shortly, corrects this oversight. (BTW: I don't have the figures on the tip-of-the-fingers about how much space is saved by using a non-tasking library, and there are also some relatively minor savings in time due to different generated code, but the Alsys salespeople know.) I think we all agree that relatively calm and sane product reviews are the province of Info-Ada, also that discussion of bugs and fixes is sometimes appropriate, also that it is frequently interesting when a manufacturer responds to a problem; but I do urge people -- using whatever product they're using -- to please contact the customer support organization of the product's manufacturer first. Everyone will end up feeling a lot better. VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: This message is going out from the keyboard of my home CP/M machine, and is not the official policy of Alsys, nor did they review it in advance, nor give me permission, etc. etc. I am an Alsys employee, and on the PC AT Ada compiler team, yet I am prone to answering mail my own way and not waiting for management approval. -- Dave Bakin (Bakin -at mit-multics.arpa)