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From: mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)
Subject: Re: Ada on the Mac (was: AppletMagic stuff)
Date: 1996/10/09
Message-ID: <53ghak$r1m@felix.seas.gwu.edu>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 188273994
references: <324BF60E.4DEF@gsfc.nasa.gov> <1996Oct7.100737.1@eisner>
 <53b87u$bm9@felix.seas.gwu.edu> <53ci2v$fef$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>
organization: George Washington University
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-10-09T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


In article <53ci2v$fef$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au>,
Richard A. O'Keefe <ok@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> wrote:

>Ahem.  Apple will sell you something called MAE (Macintosh Application
>Environment).  What is it?  It's a complete System 7.1, with some 7.5 bits,
>running on SPARC/UNIX and HPPA/HPUX systems.  (The opposite of MachTen.)
>According to the documentation I have, it does this by translating
>>>68k<< code to SPARC or HPPA native code on the fly.  The document
>makes no mention of translartion PPC instructions to anything else.

Either your documentation is really out of date, or MAE is a dead
product. I'm not very familiar with it, but if it's being kept current,
it's an alternative for those who happen to have a Sun or HP box lying
around.:-)

>This suggests that a rather nice development environment might be
>to use a MAE-emulated 68k as the host for UNIX work...

Well, recent Macs make pretty decent development machines, at prices
much lower than Sun or HP boxes. I've been working on the GNAT-Mac stuff
using a 7500 (100 MHZ PPC, PCI bus) that cost me about $2k (plus about $800.
for a nice monitor). 

I started out with 16mb RAM, but - because Apple's pre-7.5.5 virtual 
memory manager was - for GNAT development - too slow, I added $500. worth of 
RAM which brought me up to 64mb. At current RAM prices, buying lots of it
is irresistible.

Apple has really improved VM in 7.5.5. Further, Tenon has been developing
a native UN*X file system that really runs like blazes, at the cost of
setting up a separate file system partition a la OS/2 or Linux.

Mike Feldman