From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.5-pre1 (2020-06-20) on ip-172-31-74-118.ec2.internal X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.5-pre1 Date: 1 Aug 93 19:47:51 GMT From: seas.gwu.edu!mfeldman@uunet.uu.net (Michael Feldman) Subject: Re: Public Domain Ada83 for Windows NT Message-ID: <1993Aug1.194751.25926@seas.gwu.edu> List-Id: In article <9307242022.aa24198@dsc.blm.gov> cjames@DSC.BLM.GOV (Colin James 062 1) writes: > > >What is necessary to obtain, by ftp or otherwise, and from where exactly, >for building a public domain type Ada83 compiler for Windows NT? > >Thanks in advance for any info. > Well, there is as yet no public-domain-type _true_ compiler for Ada on any platform. Ada/Ed is there, which handles full Ada83 except for some Chapter 13 stuff that doesn't make sense for its virtual-machine execution. Is Ada/Ed a compiler? Certainly it is. It has the usual lexical, syntactic, semantic, and code-generation phases, and sure looks like a compiler. It's just that the back-end delivers instructions for a virtual machine. Ada/Ed just happens to come with a software emulator for that machine; some would call that emulator an interpreter. You could probably build Ada/Ed on NT; the C source code is available from wuarchive.wustl.edu, in languages/ada/compiler/adaed. It should be pretty straightforward if your C compiler is gcc-compatible. So Ada/Ed is both a compiler and not a compiler. Suppose you need real code? As far as I know, nobody has written a virtual-code-to-real-code back-end for Ada/Ed. It certainly would be possible, though I think it's a bit late in the day to start with that (if only it had been done 5 years ago...). Better to get your arms around the structure of GNAT, which will shortly (December 93) be able to handle all of Ada9X and be freely available via the usual GNU distribution channels. GNAT is available now for SPARC, but that is an interim release that doesn't yet compile all of Ada, though it will syntax-analyze all of Ada9X and do partial semantic analysis as well. It is written in Ada83; ports to other platforms will apparently be handled via the gcc cross-compilation scheme, though NYU has not finalized the method yet. The goal is to permit distribution and porting using only gcc facilities, without needing to have an Ada compiler to compile your Ada compiler :-) Indeed, as NYU has explained here, their current work uses GNAT to compile new versions of itself, so it's a classical bootstrapping situation. You can ftp GNAT from cs.nyu.edu, directory pub/gnat. I'm not sure whether NYU is planning explicitly to do an NT port of GNAT, though they are readying a release for OS/2, which is - so I've read - resonably similar. We should see commercial NT systems soon. Alsys and Meridian are (if I'm not mistaken) both getting NT compilers together; I think they have mentioned that on this group. I don't know about RR. If they aren't, they certainly oughta be! :-) Mike Feldman ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Michael B. Feldman - co-chair, SIGAda Education Committee Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science The George Washington University - Washington, DC 20052 USA 202-994-5253 (voice) - 202-994-0227 (fax) - mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Internet) "We just changed our CONFIG.SYS, then pressed CTRL-ALT-DEL. It was easy." -- Alexandre Giglavyi, director Lyceum of Information Technologies, Moscow. ------------------------------------------------------------------------