Re: !!! WHERE CAN I FIND A GOOD FREE ADA 83 OR 95 COMPILER FOR MY PC ??? !!!

[dewar@gnat.com]

In article <362b9f57.1365959@nntp.magic.fr>,
  eric.hilaire@magic.fr (Eric HILAIRE) wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm looking for an ADA compiler for my PC (I'm more interested in the
> 95 version but the 83 one will be a good beginning for me!)
> thanXXX.


It seems appropriate for me to answer this, in view of the thread about
"GNAT Free?" that has recently appeared :-)

Yes indeed Eric, there is a freely available Ada 95 compiler, GNAT. This is a
full featured Ada 95 compiler (indeed GNAT is so far the only available Ada 95
compiler that implements the core and all the optional annexes(*)). You can
download a version from many FTP sites, including ftp directories pub/gnat at
cs.nyu.edu. Many PC versions are available, for various operating systems,
including Linux, OS/2, Win95, and WIN/NT.

There is definitely no point in looking at Ada 83 at this point (and
interestingly, there never was a practical freely available version of
Ada 83, one of the great pities in retrospect!)

(*) I am looking forward to the point in time when we can no longer say this.
It would be really nice to see the other Ada vendors implement all the
optional annexes. In particular, it would be really nice to see other
implementations of the distributed systems annex. I think this is a very
exciting feature of Ada 95 with tremendous potential, but the full potential
is not realized unless all Ada 95 compilers implement this feature. In
particular, the distribution annex offers a path for convenient integration
of Ada programs across multiple machines using different Ada compilers.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies

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