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From: mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)
Subject: Re: Ada on the Mac (was: AppletMagic stuff)
Date: 1996/10/07
Message-ID: <53b87u$bm9@felix.seas.gwu.edu>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 187340059
references: <324BF60E.4DEF@gsfc.nasa.gov>
 <mheaney-ya023180000610961022420001@news.ni.net>
 <5395s7$bu8@felix.seas.gwu.edu> <1996Oct7.100737.1@eisner>
organization: George Washington University
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-10-07T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


In article <1996Oct7.100737.1@eisner>,
Larry Kilgallen <kilgallen@eisner.decus.org> wrote:

>Symantec has expressed a policy of welcoming other compilers to their
>IDE, freely publishing the interface specifications.  They are being
>beaten up about their Pascal non-support so they seem an unlikely
>candidate to do a compiler, but adapting to their IDE might be
>possible for someone else.  

Which compiler would you adapt to their UI? 

GNAT? That would require yet another GCC port.

AdaMagic? Evidently Intermetrics, which had a contract to develop a
  Mac port, found this to be infeasible or not cost-effective, or
  whatever, so they dropped the Mac port (with AJPO's permission).

A whole 'nother Ada 95 compiler? Who's going to come up with the
  20-25 person years usually estimated for such a thing?

>Symantec may have a reputation
>below that of Metrowerks in the Macintosh developer community,
>but for many their IDE ranks far above MPW (which is alleged
>to be still quite command-line oriented).

The problem is not selecting the IDE but doing the compiler.
>
>
(referring to MachTen producing standalone Mac apps)

>But my understanding is the current version still requires MachTen
>for executing on a 68K machine.  That may work for education (the
>basis on which this thread has been proceeding), but is not viable
>for most commercial applications.

I agree with you. If Tenon comes to see this as a business advantage,
maybe they will do it. IMHO, the way to go is not to worry too much
about the 68k as a _host_, but rather to focus on a PPC-hosted
cross-compiler capable of producing fat (68k+PPC) binaries.

As my note yesterday pointed out, MachTen has been marketed historically
as a UN*X server, not so much as a development system. This is changing,
and GNAT-Mac is a big part of the change. If it "works" - if MachTen
becomes a decently popular development system - then its creators will
have the incentives to make the enhancements we'd all like to see.
>
>> Currently, the only big thing missing from the GNAT-Mac distribution
>> is the ability to link _tasking_ programs as standalone apps. This is
>> changing fast; we expect to have a standalone tasking runtime ready
>> for release in the very near future, quite possibly with 3.07.
>
>Keep us posted.

Don't worry - we'll shout it from the rooftops.:-)
>
>Larry Kilgallen

Mike Feldman