Re: GCC 3.1 with GNAT ... Cool!

[achrist@easystreet.com]

"Jeffrey D. Cherry" wrote:
> 
> I would like to give my compliments to all who participated in
> incorporating GNAT into the GCC.  It's a real treat to have one 
> compiler installation, one command shell, and be able to build 
> programs in Ada, C, C++, or FORTRAN 77 using the same shell and
> compiler.  This is so cool!
> 
> A few weeks ago I downloaded the MinGW distribution of GCC 3.1 (dated
> 16 May 2002), installed it on my Windows 2000 machine, and compiled a
> bunch of rather simple legacy Ada, C, C++, and FORTRAN 77 programs.  
> They all ran successfully.  I installed the Win32 API and the Win32Ada
> bindings and compiled several more small Ada programs that used some 
> Win32 services. These ran successfully as well.  I then installed the
> Booch components and although there were several warnings during the 
> compile step, all the tests and demo programs ran successfully.  I 
> compiled several of my Ada programs that utilitze the Booch components
> and they ran successfully as well.  I installed an old POSIX binding
> (Pascal Obry's Win32POSIX) and the tests in that distribution ran 
> successfully.  I had one Ada program that used  the POSIX binding so 
> I tried compiling it and it ran successfully as > well.
> 
> Rather pleased with all this, I downloaded the GNU Pascal Compiler,
> installed it, and compiled a rather large suite of static code 
> analysis  tools (all written in Borland Pascal with Objects, v7).  
> After some tweaking, they all compiled.  I ran the resulting tools 
> against some code I had analyzed a few years ago and checked the 
> output against the archived copy.  Except for the time and date of the
> analysis runs, the outputs were identical.  It's been quite a 
> productive month.
> 

Impressive indeed.  Only about half of commercial software works that 
well out of the box.  For so many pieces of software from diverse 
contributors to work together like that is something that should help 
promote Ada at least a little. 

Some questions:

1. Did you download binaries or source for all of this? (URL's?)

2. Are there step-by-step directions for setting all this up available 
anywhere on-line?  (URL?) (If students can do this, there must be
step-by-step directions somewhere, right?)

3. If there aren't step-by-step directions, wouldn't it be nice if there
were?  If there aren't, I'd be willing to try to write some if you or 
someone can point me toward what it takes to make it all happen.

TIA


Al