looking for a public domain ada compiler

[karl@grebyn.com (Karl Nyberg)]

   Date:     Wed, 15 Nov 89 09:53 CST
   From: <haven!VMA.CC.CMU.EDU!WSR5672%TNTECH.BITNET>

   Does anyone know of a good public domain Ada compiler?

Depends on what you mean by GOOD...  I understand there's some stuff from
Florida State that may be available for reproduction costs (Ted - is this
true?).  Also, I think certain flavors of the AL/S may be licensed for
government use (and certain non-distribution use) in a way that is pretty
cheap.

   I need something would run on UNIX (Sun workstations)  or ULTRIX (Vax 750).

I think the FSU stuff is on the Sun, while the ALS stuff is VAX/VMS based.

	   Has GNU made any plans to produce one?

I asked about this a year or so ago.  I seem to recall the response was
along the lines that there was more important stuff to be done, namely the
operating system, with the limited resources that they had.  It was in the
queue of things to be done, but they had no schedule or people interested in
doing the work.  I think the effort is primarily a matter of taking the
existing C (and C++) compilers, the Ada grammar, adding some semantic
analysis (non-trivial), probably having to rework some of the intermediate
language, building specialized runtimes for Ada, and possibly tweaking the
code generator(s).  Oh yeah, the optimizer.  Might actually prove to be a
useful collection of projects for a term course in compiler writing.

Many compiler vendors also provide significant educational discounts.  I
seem to recall something on the range of 70-90% off for some vendors.

-- Karl --