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From: Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Why are Ada compilers difficult to write ?
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2018 10:33:17 -0700
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Date: 2018-06-24T10:33:17-07:00
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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.