Mac Ada

[James Hopper <hopperj@dayton.saic.com>]

In article <1994Oct18.175809.26163@nosc.mil> Beth Walker,
bwalker@nosc.mil writes:
>Looks like Ada/Ed will be it for MacIntosh folks.  There will be
>NO commercial Ada compiler for the Mac.

Not entirely true.  I know of one commercial ada vendor who is very
interested
in porting their AIX R/6000 compiler to powerMac.  It might even be fairly
sraightforward given that a few people have gotten object code from AIX
C compilers to link and run in the powermac environment [at least thats
their
claim on the mac newsgroups].  

Also Motorolla is funding verdix to produce a powerpc compiler for their
processors. if as expected they have signed license agreement with apple 
to sell powermacs into the gov't environment i would expect them to port
this to powermac.  [hey i can dream ;-)]

In additon the major problem according to
several people with getting gcc to work for the mac was apples support
for the pacal keyword which caused c to genreate calls with pascal
conventions
as to argument order on the stack, return value location etc.  The
Powermac
and the new Universal interfaces have dropped this requirement making a
gcc
and thus a GNAT port more standard.

In addition i know of at least one person who has gcc 2.6 running on a mac
under a freeware unix shell called MacMint.  Linux is being worked on
for the powermac and there is already a linux port for GNAT.
either of these would make porting gnat much more doable in the opinion
of several people who should know.  

Bottom line, all is not lost.


Jim Hopper