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From: Paul Colin de Gloucester <Gloster@nicht.at>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Petition ARM to not hinder Ada
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 2015 16:08:50 +0200
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Date: 2015-10-01T16:08:50+02:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

It is possible to obtain GNAT for ARM if one is already an Ada
programmer and wants to obtain an Ada compiler. However, a person who
is simply planning on targeting ARM hardware might accept a
cross-compiler for bad languages. ARM provides a copy of GCC with a
customized configuration script which is incompatible with the
standard switch  --enable-languages=ada  for configure but ARM
indicated to me that if demand could be shown, then ARM might support
Ada.

Colin Paul de Glocester emailed for ARM:
"[. . .]

I built cross compilers from
  HTTPS://LaunchPad.net/gcc-arm-embedded/4.9/4.9-2015-q2-update/+download/gcc-arm-none-eabi-4_9-2015q2-20150609-src.tar.bz2 
on different GNU/Linux distributions than Ubuntu.

Congratulations, but it is not perfect.

[. . .]

Ada is a better language than the languages which
gcc-arm-none-eabi-4_9-2015q2-20150609-src.tar.bz2 supports. Please
consider supporting Ada. [. . .]
[. . .]"

ARM emailed on September 22nd, 2015:
"> From: Colin Paul de Glocester [. . .]
> Sent: Monday, September 21, 2015 6:48 PM
>
> Ada is a very good engineering language. You should consider it.

Note that including it or not result of a compromise: including it
will make our toolchain bigger which incurs a penalty for all the
people not using
this language but downloading our toolchain. So it needs to be
balanced with the number of people who would benefit from having this
support. I invite
you to create a question on the Launchpad page to keep public track of
this request."

Would you like to ask such a question on
  HTTPS://Answers.Launchpad.net/gcc-arm-embedded 
?

ARM mistakenly claimed "including it will make our toolchain bigger",
because even if ARM would merely provide an installation script which
would be compatible with  --enable-languages=ada  instead of with a
pre-compiled GNAT then this would be a partial victory.