Re: ada -> C translator

[fjh@mundook.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Fergus Henderson)]

dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:

>Bob Duff said
>
><<First, what do you want:
>
>1. Do you want it to handle the entire Ada language correctly?
>
>2. Do you want it to produce C that is understandable to humans (e.g. C
>programmers)?  (I.e. do you want a compiler that happens to produce C,
>and you'll maintain the Ada code, or do you want to throw away the Ada
>code, and maintain the C code?)
>
>3. Do you want the C code to be efficient?
>>>
>
>To this you should add a fourth question:
>
>4. Do you want the C code to be portable?
>
>If you get into the business of generating very low level C code, then
>it may well be highly target dependent (e.g. have made decisions about
>representation of primitive data items).

Yep, if you want efficiency, you may need to use machine-dependent
code.  However, you can get this without sacrificing portability
if you keep the less efficient but portable C code as a fallback.

	#if THIS_SYSTEM_SUPPORTS_IT
	... nonportable efficient code ...
	#else
	... portable but not-so-efficient code ...
	#endif

Of course, this assumes that the answer to question 2 was "no".

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