Re: Why are Ada compilers difficult to write ?

["Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net>]

On Friday, June 22, 2018 at 6:15:45 PM UTC-5, Luke A. Guest wrote:
> Dan'l Miller <> wrote:
> 
> > Writing a compiler in OP refers to both 
> 
> OP???

the original posting of this thread; the original poster's posting that started this thread

> > writing it from scratch as well as maintenance over the years.  All of
> > the Ada compilers listed on that antiquated page are in various stages of
> > broken links, out of business, and no longer supporting Z80 in recent •decades•.
> > 
> 
> Well, the Z80 is no longer supported, you can at least still buy them. I
> have one sitting in my desk ready to be put into a retroputer.

Which is a little ironic that antiquated hot slow limited-RAM power-slurping hardware at the heart of the CP/M era and the Timex/Sinclair era outlived the Ada-compiler software of the same era.  Who would've predicted that?  Thus demonstrating once again:  bit-rot in software is real.

Speaking of retrocomputers, there was a point many years ago at which Zilog notified its customers of the Z8000 (the 16-bit version of the Z80) of the last-time buy manufacturing run.  I once worked for the telecom company that was one of those Z8000 customers who received that last-time-buy notice.  They sent a quite official response, in person to Zilog's C-level executives, I think:  hey Zilog, speaking of last-time-buy for the Z8000, we assume that this is the last-time-buy for the masks too.  We'd like to buy the Z8000 masks & all related fab data to manufacture Z8000s ourselves henceforth.

… And that is how the Air Force started buying Z8000s during the 1990s from that telecom equipment manufacturer instead of from Zilog.

> > * e.g., 64 KiB DRAM address space; clock rate of single-digit or tens of megahertz
> > 
> > Various ports of GCC to Z80 exist, but they seem to focus exclusively on
> > C-proper, instead of on C++ or Ada.
> > 
> 
> The ports are in various states of broken-ness as well. None are up to
> date, all are partially done. Believe me I’ve looked.

I can understand phasing Alpha and VAX and National Semiconductor 32032 ISAs out of modern GCC because each is no longer manufactured, but I think that every compiler should support every processor on the planet that is manufactured •today•.