Release date of GNAT

Release date of GNAT

[news.intercon.com!panix!netnews!slinky.cs.nyu.edu!slinky.cs.nyu.edu!nobod]

			First Release of GNAT.
			----------------------

We are scheduling the first release of GNAT for Friday July 9. The slight
delay will allow us to release an integrated system with a single executable,
that is to say a product whose interface is that of other GCC compilers.
The systems that were demonstrated at Ada-Europe and at WAdaS contained 
separate executables for front-end and back-end that communicated through
files, a structure that we feel is inappropriate for a GNU product, 
unnecessarily inefficient, and, well, ugly. Between now and July 9, source
files and executables together with documentation on the structure
and use of the system will start appearing in the anonymous ftp directory
"pub/gnat" on cs.nyu.edu (128.122.140.24).

We will broadcast a message to the gnat mailing list when all components
are available. We apologize for this slight delay, which is not due to
any technical difficulties but simply the desire to release a better-built
system.  

We remind our eager users that this is a preliminary release. The fact
that this release is bootstrapped, i.e. is sufficiently strong to compile 
itself, is a nice proof of existence of GNAT but no more than that: the
system is currently only an implementation of a subset of Ada83 (enough of
a subset to write a compiler!) and we do not expect to have a reasonably
complete Ada 9X system until the TriAda conference. We think that the parser
(full Ada 9X) of the current version, the interesting library management
system, and the overall performance of the system, will make this early
release interesting to the Ada community, even in its embryonic form.

GNAT Project