Re: GNU Ada Status?

[seas.gwu.edu!mfeldman@uunet.uu.net (Michael Feldman)]

In article <C60BKq.8JA@taurus.cs.nps.navy.mil> spear@cs.nps.navy.mil (Jon Spear
) writes:
>
>This has been asked a few times recently in the comp.lang.ada
>newsgroup, but with no public response. (None that I saw, anyway.)  
>
>Would someone who knows, please post a summary of what's happening
>or planned with the GNU Ada Translator project? 
>
The NYU folks are working away on this, which is, no doubt, why they don't
have time to keep answering questions on the net. They are planning to demo
something reasonable - I believe - at Ada-Europe in June.

Their plan has been to get out a release in 1993. From the level of
activity I have detected among my contacts there, they will make it.

I received a note - which may have been posted to this group - in January or
thereabouts, showing a small Ada program going through the entire process
from Ada source to SPARC machine code; the note displayed the tree built
by the front end, and illustrated that an Ada program could get all the
way through the gcc back end (which NYU is modifying). This proof-of-
concept was good to see - they had all the pieces stitched together.
Good software engineering - get the interfaces done FIRST so everything
is integrated at every step.

I reckon that they are adding code generation and run-time support 
progressively, part of the language at a time. These guys know how to
do an Ada compiler - GNAT is really their 3rd one, as Ada/Ed-SETL and
Ada/Ed-C preceded this one. Most of the people on the project are the
same guys, and the one who's revising the gcc back end has worked on
gcc stuff in the past, before this Ada project started. Good team, IMHO.
They'll deliver the goods.

Mike Feldman

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael B. Feldman
co-chair, SIGAda Education Committee

Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
School of Engineering and Applied Science
The George Washington University
Washington, DC 20052 USA
(202) 994-5253 (voice)
(202) 994-5296 (fax)
mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Internet)

"The most important thing is to be sincere, 
and once you've learned how to fake that, you've got it made." 
-- old show-business adage
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