> >     I'll second Vic on this.  My experience with converting from VADS to
> > GNAT has been that the ONLY noticible cost is the restesting.  Even on
> > fairly large software suites, the time to get recompiled and up and running
> > is less than it takes to talk about it.

Third.

I have spent less then 45 hours porting 17,000 files from Apex to GNAT.  Only
two (maybe three) significant* compiler bugs found in that time, and these
affected less than 30 files.  One of these bugs bit about fifteen files,
but for all of them, a slight restructuring of the code was enough to
compile.

A good portion of those hours was spent repeating things because I didn't
have the disk space to do it right the first time.  :-)

* "significant" meaning the bug took more than a couple of days for ACT to
fix it.

Now it didn't take 45 hours to talk about that, but we'll tolerate a little
exaggeration.  :-)