Re: Wanted: Ada environment for Mac

[mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)]

GW-Ada/Ed Program Development Environment for Apple Macintosh
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May 1994 
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Prof. Michael B. Feldman 
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science 
The George Washington University Washington, DC 20052 
(202) 994-5919 (voice) 
(202) 994-5296 (fax) 
mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Internet)

We are happy to (re-)announce the first release of GW-Ada/Ed for the Apple
Macintosh family of computers. This software is now available by
anonymous ftp from wuarchive.wustl.edu, in the directory
languages/ada/compiler/adaed/gwu/mac.

The purpose of the reannouncement is to let you know that source code
is now available for the entire compiler and development environment.

This project was sponsored by The George Washington University, and in
part by the United States Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) under
contract #FY3592-93-10234, administered by Phillips Laboratory, Kirtland
AFB, NM 87117-5776. 

Copyright (C) 1994, Manuel A. Perez and Michael Bliss Feldman 

This program is free software, distributed under the terms of the GNU 
General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation. 

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT 
ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS 
FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. 

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I. ABOUT THE GW-Ada/Ed-Mac DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT 

GW-Ada/Ed-Mac is a development environment built around the New York
University (NYU) AdaEd compiler/interpreter. It allows the editing,
compiling, binding and execution of Ada 83 programs. GW-Ada/Ed-Mac was
supervised by Prof. Michael B. Feldman. Manuel A. Perez, a GWU doctoral
student in Computer Science, is responsible for the Macintosh version,
including the editor and developer shell. 

NYU's original README file is included in the distribution, for your
information. In summary, Ada/Ed was developed several years ago, and
validated under the Ada Compiler Validation Capability suite then in
effect. Ada/Ed is a full-scale compiler, which generates instructions for
a virtual machine. Execution is carried out by an interpreter for this
virtual machine. 

Ada/Ed handles nearly all of Ada 83, including tasking and generics.
Not supported are a number of machine-dependent features, most of which
are not sensible to support in a virtual-machine environment.

The multi-window editor follows the usual Macintosh menu and command-key
conventions. Source files are limited to 32k characters, however. 
Standard output is sent to a subset-VT100 console window, so that cursor 
addressing and other ANSI escape sequences are supported. We think that
the system will be fun to use and as easy to work with as most Mac 
programs are. Students who have tested the system comment that it, like
GW-Ada/Ed-DOS, is a great way to learn Ada.

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II. ACQUIRING AND INSTALLING GW-Ada/Ed-Mac FROM AN FTP ARCHIVE 

System requirements - a Mac with a 68030 or 68040 processor, System 7, and
at least 4mb of RAM. You should have around 10mb free space on your hard
disk, too. The program will not run under System 6; it appears to be OK with
a 68020 processor. You are welcome to try, but we make no promises. 

The distribution contains 7 files, as given below. If you are interested
only in using GW-Ada/Ed-Mac but not modifying it, you need not copy the
first file, which contains the source code (in C and C++).

-rw-r--r--   1 archiver archive   2020836 May 26 20:07 GWAdaSource.sea.hqx
-rw-r--r--   1 3007     archive    155782 Jan 22 12:26 adaprogs.sea.hqx
-rw-r--r--   1 3007     archive   1192295 Jan 31 12:21 gw-adaed.sea.hqx
-rw-r--r--   1 archiver archive       497 May 28 17:06 packing.lst
-rw-r--r--   1 3007     archive      4669 Jan 22 12:27 readme.mac
-rw-r--r--   1 3007     archive     24329 Jan 22 12:27 readme.nyu
-rw-r--r--   1 3007     archive     11182 Jan 30 16:16 userman.mac


readme.mac gives brief instructions for unpacking and installing the
system.  

readme.nyu is the original NYU document for Ada/Ed; you don't need it
to run this system, but it contains useful background information. 

userman.mac is a brief user manual for GW-Ada/Ed-Mac; you can open it with
any ASCII editor or Word Processor; we recommend that you open it with the
GW-Ada/Ed-Mac editor, once you've installed the system.

The files gw-adaed.sea.hqx and adaprogs.sea.hqx are BinHex-ed
self-extracting Stuffit archives. Once you've downloaded the files to your
Mac, you need to use the BinHex utility program to un-encode them. BinHex
is a free program that you can pick up from any Mac archive or user group. 

The folder named "GWU AdaEd Folder" contains a file icon "GWU Ada"with a
version number. This is a double-clickable application. The other files
are not. Do NOT move or otherwise disturb these files! GW-Ada/Ed expects
to find those files, and behavior will be unpredictable if you mess with
them. The folders GWUDemos, NYUDemos, and Spider contain sets of
interesting programs to de,onstrate the capabilities of GW-Ada/Ed-Mac and
of Ada in general. GWUDemos was produced by GWU, NYUDemos by NYU, and
Spider by John Dalbey of California Polytechnic State University at San
Luis Obispo.

Once all four folders are available on your Mac, start reading the user
manual, which gives a brief tutorial on using the system.

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IV. Electronic Discussion Group

We are happy to announce the formation of an automated mailing list
for discussions about GW-Ada/Ed. We get a lot of repetitive e-mail
on this subject, so we decided to make the discussions public.
Several of us at GW will be regularly reading and responding to
messages from this list. 

To use the list, you must first subscribe. Send an e-mail note to
listproc@seas.gwu.edu. The subject line must be _empty_; the message
should contain the 3 lines

help
help set
subscribe gw-adaed firstname lastname (substitute your own names!)

The first 2 lines will get you help messages indicating how to use the 
various options listproc provides; the third line subscribes you to the
list. This is all automated; our hands do not touch your message.

Once you get an e-mail acknowledgement of your subscription, you can
write to the list by sending e-mail to gw-adaed@seas.gwu.edu. In messages
to the list, do _not_ leave the subject line empty.

We hope you will spread around the news of the availability of this list.
You do _not_ need Usenet news accesss or ftp to join the list; you need
only to be able to send and receive Internet e-mail.

We hope you enjoy the list, and using GW-Ada/Ed!

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