Re: GNAT versions ( was :Ada compiler for PC?)

[Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-dejanews.com>]

In article <FBAEH2.9C0@kithrup.com>,
  mrs@kithrup.com (Mike Stump) wrote:

> Well, I take exception to the word entirely.  There was a mailing list
> called eh@cygnus.com, and we discussed tons of details and issues,
> from many language perspectives, including Ada and C++.

This was in my response to the claim that unfortunately the exception
handling in Ada had been developed entirely independently of the
mechanism in C++.

I did the design and implementation of the exception handling in
Ada, so I am pretty familiar with what was and was not done. Yes
there were early discussions about trying to deal with commonality
between the languages, but unfortunately these did not result in
a common facility. I tried to understand what had been done for
C++ but failed. Others here at ACT are still trying to do more
merging here, but it is not easy. I found no high level interface
oriented description of the mechanism used for C++. Perhaps I
simply did not look hard enough, or just did not know how to read
the code correctly. I find the back end of GCC rather difficult
to navigate (and indeed in a recent email Per Bothner (hope I
remembered the spelling right) claimed that the entire gcc compiler
was ill-documented so why single out the exception handling). I
find that position FAR too pessimistic, and indeed in general the
gcc backend is documented a lot better than many proprietary
compilers with which I am familiar, but in this particular case,
we have not yet achieved the ideal of merging the exception handling
of C++ and Ada. I believe this could only have been achieved if we
had started with a fully documented high level design.

Again, this may simply be a different way of working, here at ACT,
we really aren't very good at roaming around code and figuring out
what is going on, we depend on a very structured design approach, so
there is undoubtedly a bit of a culture clash :-) :-)


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