Re: Ada->Javascript?

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

tmoran@acm.org writes:
> Does there exist any kind of Ada to Javascript translator?  Even
> something that took compilable, but not runnable, simple Ada to
> Javascript.  Having an Ada compiler check for typos, type errors, etc,
> and handle enumeration types, non-zero array'first, etc etc would be a
> great help.

In principle you could do this with an Ada-to-C translator (several
exist) followed by Emscripten.  If the idea is just to get a strongly
typed language to run in the browser though, there are much better
alternatives.  I've been looking at Purescript (purescript.org) which is
Haskell-like, while others like Dart are a bit more mainstream.  The
thing to keep in mind is that Javascript is a managed, garbage collected
language, a design that trades off real-time and bounded-memory
capabilities for a lot more programming convenience.  An Ada front end
would give up the convenience without getting the Ada capabilities back.
So something like Purescript is a better match.