Re: GNAT on NT anybody

[lab.ultra.nyu.edu!kenner@nyu.edu (Richard Kenner)]

In article <25kmdn$16u@cmcl2.NYU.EDU> I wrote:
>It it our plan to not require a binary to build GNAT, merely a C
>compiler.  Most of the Ada code is at a fairly low level and fairly
>regular.  We intend to provide an Ada-to-C translator for the subset
>of Ada used in most of GNAT.  For some of the other Ada modules, such
>as error handling, we'll provide C code that will link, but not do
>much (i.e., abort when asked to print an error, since there won't be
>any compiling GNAT).  This will allow a bootstrap path.

It was pointed out to me that this can easily be misinterpreted, so I
want to be very explicit: we have no plans on doing anything that
could in any way be construed as a general "Ada to C translator".  The
program I described above would be a very specialized bootstrap tool
that would read some of the Ada files in GNAT and produce C code that
would be equivalent.  We expect this to be possible due to the
stylized way in which these part of GNAT were written.  The output of
the program would only be able to be compiled by GNU C because, for 
example, we might add features to GNU C for that purpose.

If this program were given some code other than these parts of GNAT,
it would not produce valid GNU C.

I should also point out that other ways exist to allow a bootstrap: we
could distribute a binary representation of the Ada tree or we could
even manually translate a sufficient subset of GNAT into C for the
purposes of bootstrap.  There may also be others we haven't thought of.

Nothing I said should be taken as anything more than our current
views as to how we would provide a bootstrap path should we have the
time and resources to do so.