Re: Building an Ada compiler

[stt@henning.camb.inmet.com (Tucker Taft)]

ErkoDJK (erkodjk@aol.com) wrote:
: Some friends and I have a crazy idea.  We want to build an Ada 95 compiler
: targeted for the Macintosh computer (without requiring Unix, like
: GNAT/GCC).   ...

You might be interested in the Mac version of AppletMagic(r),
and Ada 95 => Java byte-code compiler.  An alpha release of 
this is available at:

    http://www.inmet.com/javadir/download/

It runs on 68k Macs (and presumably PPC using emulation) without
needing "MachTen."

As far as your other question, building a compiler, or interpreter,
for any of the major object-oriented languages, is a big job.
Much more practical would be to do the work to rehost GNAT/GCC
to MacOS.  There is nothing inherently hard about this rehost,
though of course it does require a desire to "dig into" the GNAT/GCC
sources enough to find their host dependencies.  Both the Metrowerks
and the Symantec compilers on the Mac come with pretty complete
Unix emulation libraries, so it isn't too bad rehosting a Unix-oriented
program to the Mac with either of these development systems.

: Thank you for your help,
: David

-Tucker Taft   stt@inmet.com   http://www.inmet.com/~stt/
Intermetrics, Inc.  Cambridge, MA  USA