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Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2018 10:39:19 -0700 (PDT)
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Subject: Re: Why are Ada compilers difficult to write ?
From: Lucretia <laguest9000@googlemail.com>
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Xref: reader02.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:53280
Date: 2018-06-24T10:39:19-07:00
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On Sunday, 24 June 2018 18:33:22 UTC+1, Paul Rubin  wrote:

> Distilled makes it sound.  It's not possible to write a minimalistic Ada
> compiler comparable in size to some of the small C or Pascal compilers
> that have been written.  Compared to an industrial-strength C compiler

It's possible, by using a subset (pragma's restrictions/profiles), but you'd still need basic packages, basic generics, integral/enum types and subprograms.

> It's also not clear to me that Ada has actual difficult-to-compile
> features (maybe it does, and I just haven't spotted them) as opposed to
> a very large number of straightforward ones.  By comparison, lots of the
> stuff in GHC resulted from academic research projects that represented
> new advances in the state of PLT knowledge.

I think it's more that once you have a parser, it's all the semantic stuff that has to go over the AST to sort out what's what.