Re: Building an Ada compiler

[bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff)]

In article <4r0u04$21b0@sat.ipp-garching.mpg.de>,
Ruediger Berlich <berlich@pc66.mppmu.mpg.de> wrote:
>Hi,
>if writing an Ada-Compiler is that much of a problem, then,
>how difficult is it to write an Ada95-Interpreter ?

Beats me.  My guess is half the time to write a compiler, or somewhat
less.  Maybe even one tenth as hard.  But I have no expertise to back
that up.

To write an Ada interpreter, you still need to understand the language,
in a way that Ada programmers (thankfully) don't need to.

As various others have pointed out, maybe you should look into GNAT more
seriously -- yes, gcc is unix-based, but it's been ported to VMS and
DOS.  Porting gcc to an an environment it's not used to might be hard,
but nowhere near as hard as writing an Ada compiler from scratch.  Once
you port gcc, porting GNAT is not so hard.

- Bob