Re: Decent ADA compiler on a Mac

[vladimir@speedy.intrepid.com (Vladimir Vukicevic)]

In article <3khii0$cgi@gnat.cs.nyu.edu> dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert
Dewar) writes:

>  The drag-and-drop paradigm for a compiler sounds nice (to compile
> just drop the source on the compiler), but in practice I think it
> would be a mmajor pain in the neck. This kind of mousing is nice for
> lots of things, but command line interfaces are ultimately much more
> appropriate for software development involving compilation and
> linking. That's why a decent compiler on the Mac is more work than
> it might be, you have to create your own command line interface of
> some kind. Yes, you could use MPW, but this is not available to most
> MAC users.

Actually, you could open up a terminal window using the communications
toolbox's terminal tools with your own display/send functions. Apple
actually supports opening up terminal windows this way; there's an
article in 'develop' issue 9 showing how to open up an output debug
window using terminal tools. It only supports output, but it could
easily be extended to support input as well. If this were done, you
would also get (with the right terminal tool) vt102 emulation,
allowing you to easily port nvi or other tty-oriented tools.

I tried to write a simple shell using this method a while ago, but
I couldn't figure out a way to run other programs. Perhaps gcc/cc1/etc.
could be modified to wait for an AppleEvent on startup, or even as
arguments to the OAPP (Open Application) event, which would contain
a string which would be the command-line arguments. These could then
run as faceless applications with no mac interface, and they could pass
error and other output back to the shell via AppleEvents. This would
require some (simple, I think) modifications to gcc/cc1/gnat1, etc. to
work in this way.

The problem that arises here is that, if this were done, the produced
ada apps might need a tty to display/get data. A mac-tty-specific version
of the gnarl might be needed to implement this. An application which
presents a Mac interface would not need to be linked against this version.
(This is assuming that you have a library that implemements versions
of unix stdio calls, like all of the currently available mac compilers do..
however, one might need to be written and placed under the GPL.)

	- Vladimir