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From: Niklas Holsti <niklas.holsti@tidorum.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: ANN: Kickstarter for beginning work on a new open-source Compiler
Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 17:20:05 +0100
Organization: Tidorum Ltd
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Xref: number.nntp.dca.giganews.com comp.lang.ada:185296
Date: 2014-03-22T17:20:05+01:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

On 14-03-22 15:59 , Dirk Craeynest wrote:
> In article <bp5enaF87mnU1@mid.individual.net>,
> Niklas Holsti  <niklas.holsti@tidorum.invalid> wrote:
>> The way you worded that suggests that Ada/Ed being an interpreter would
>> have prevented using it to bootstrap GNAT, but of course that is not so.
>> As long as *GNAT* was able to generate an executable, one could have
>> used Ada/Ed to execute GNAT (albeit through interpretation) to compile
>> the GNAT source code into an executable GNAT.
> 
> You are right, of course.  Thanks for correcting.
> (I don't know where my mind was when I wrote that.)
> 
> Dirk
> 
> PS: It would've take "quite" some time to bootstrap, though...

Certainly with the SETL version of Ada/Ed, yes. The C version might have
been fast enough.

But it occurs to me now that perhaps the interpreter nature of Ada/Ed
was indeed an obstacle to GNAT bootstrapping, because, AIUI, only the
front-end of GNAT is written in Ada; the rest is C/C++ from GCC. So
Ada/Ed could execute only the front-end of GNAT. A bootstrap with Ada/Ed
would have required a file-based (or piped) transfer of the intermediate
output from the front-end to the back-end. I don't know if GCC already
had some file-based intermediate representation; if not, it would have
been extra work for the GNAT team to implement one.

-- 
Niklas Holsti
Tidorum Ltd
niklas holsti tidorum fi
      .      @       .