Re: Why are Ada compilers difficult to write ?

[Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>]

Lucretia <laguest9000@googlemail.com> writes:
>> Ada might be harder to compile than C or Pascal, but not by *that* much
> You are living in a dream world [if] you think that.

You are right, looking into this a little further, the amount of stuff
in Ada is enormous compared to C or Pascal, much larger than Ada
Distilled makes it sound.  It's not possible to write a minimalistic Ada
compiler comparable in size to some of the small C or Pascal compilers
that have been written.  Compared to an industrial-strength C compiler
though, it's still not that big an increment: i.e. GNAT was not that
large an addition to GCC.

It's also not clear to me that Ada has actual difficult-to-compile
features (maybe it does, and I just haven't spotted them) as opposed to
a very large number of straightforward ones.  By comparison, lots of the
stuff in GHC resulted from academic research projects that represented
new advances in the state of PLT knowledge.