Re: Running GNAT from the VB3 Shell Command

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

In article <3bu04a$94j@news.cais.com>,
Lance Kibblewhite <lance@cais.cais.com> wrote:

>I have tried 1.83, and have never got it to work.  I am able to compile 
>and bind, but the .EXE's never seem to work.  I can't even get the 
>hello.adb example to work!

gnatbl produces an executable in coff form, not a true DOS
.exe. This is not really a GNAT problem, it's really an aspect of
the djgpp (gcc for DOS) extender. This is spelled out in the
djgpp docs but not the GNAT ones, which NYU is trying to keep as
platform-independent as possible.

To run it, try

go32 hello (or whatever the output file is called)

or convert the coff to exe by running

coff2exe hello

The preliminary GNAT 2.0 I got at TRI-Ada fixes this by building the 
conversion into gnatbl. If the official distribution release does too,
it'll solve lots of problems.

The entire extender problem will be fixed with the next release of djgpp,
which is expected in a few months and will use "pure" DPMI memory.

Cheers -

Mike Feldman
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Michael B. Feldman -  chair, SIGAda Education Working Group
Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The George Washington University -  Washington, DC 20052 USA
202-994-5919 (voice) - 202-994-0227 (fax) - mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Internet)
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