Re: Commercial C To Ada 95 compiler

[Richard Riehle <richard@adaworks.com>]

Henrik Quintel wrote:

> Dear all,
> does someone knows an ANSI C to Ada 95 compiler (commercial)?
> The compiler has to translate C header and C body files.

This idea, if you will forgive my being blunt, makes absolutely
no sense at all.    Ada is built on a design model more sophisticated
than C, and any attempt to promote C syntax to the Ada structural
model is likely to produce the kind of code that make Ada look
bad.    We have seen enough of this absurdity in the Fortran to
Ada translators and Jovial to Ada translators.

The problem is this: how do you promote low-level syntactic
constructs, with none of the elegance of Ada's type model, and
no hint of scope and visibility rules, to good Ada code.  How do
you convert a program written in a language where the default for
every construct is unsafe to a program written in a language where
the default for every construct is safe. It is simply not worth the
effort to try.

Richard Riehle