Re: JGNAT

["Marc A. Criley" <mcNOSPAM@mckae.com>]

Andrew Carroll wrote:
> Can a program be created such that JGNAT can be used as well as compile
> without JGNAT?  Like be able to output both Java classes and regular
> "executables" given one "set" of code?

Yes.  But IF, and ONLY IF, you stick to pure, vanilla Ada code.  That 
means no Java libraries for user interfaces or anything.  (You could of 
course always create wrapper packages that are then implemented either 
natively or with Java libraries.)

And JGNAT 1.1 is pretty hoary by now; it had bugs, and was almost 
production-ready, but it was dropped as an AdaCore maintained product 
some time ago.  And if I recall correctly (it's been over 3 years since 
I last used it), while it worked pretty good with JDK 1.2, tasking broke 
with JDK 1.3, and I vaguely recall reports that it just pretty much 
didn't work much at all with 1.4.

Unless you want to pick up the JGNAT sources and bring them up to snuff 
(which would be great! :-), I'd be hard-pressed to think of any 
practical use for it--unless you want to play around with it on old JDKs.

For something along the same lines, you might want to look at A#, which 
is Ada for the .NET platform.  It is being actively maintained, albeit 
as a university computer science research project:
   (http://www.usafa.af.mil/dfcs/bios/mcc_html/a_sharp.html

Marc A. Criley
McKae Technologies
www.mckae.com