Re: Ada and Mainframes

[mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu]

In a previous article,  <kilgallen@eisner.decus.org> writes:
[snip]
>
>For whatever reason, IBM transferred their MVS Ada product to
>OC Systems, who offer it under the name LegacyAda, alongside their
>AIX Ada offerings.  In addition to the typical ways of looking
>up a vendor, I believe you can find OC Systems through the AdaIC
>web pages, as they participate in various cooperative efforts
>between Ada vendors.  There are occasional posts to this group
>by OC Systems folk, although I doubt any of them have sales and
>marketing experience.
>
[snip]

>Larry Kilgallen

I used the Ada 83 IBM compiler a good bit, both at GW and as a teacher 
of in-house Ada courses at IBM Federal Systems. As I recall, IBM's compiler 
was never really developed by IBM. The front end came from TeleSoft (which 
later merged with Alsys, which became Thomson, which became Aonix). The 
ports to AIX, VM, and MVS, were done by OC Systems under contract to IBM.
IBM never did more than market it under their own name. So it was
natural that asa IBM -- like most other hardware companies -- got out of 
the Ada compiler business, eventually these compilers would revert to OC, 
which would commercialize them directly.

Perhaps someone out there knows which front end is used by the OC compilers 
for Ada 95. If I had to make a wild guess, it would be AdaMagic, the
Intermetrics-made front end that is used, among others, in the Aonix
ObjectAda products. Anyone know for sure?

A historical fact about Ada 83 is that among the various hardware companies,
only DEC did their own compiler. IBM, Sun, Control Data, and others
all OEM-ed the compilers, or the front ends at least, from the "regular" 
Ada 83 compiler houses: Alsys, TeleSoft, and Verdix (which was absorbed by
Rational) mostly.

As far as I know, for Ada 95 there are 5 compiler families: GNAT,
AdaMagic/ObjectAda, Rational, DDC-I, and RR. Unless I've missed
something, all others use the front end (at least) from one of these.

Mike Feldman


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