Re: GNAT on Win 95

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

iBob Crispen says

"Ditto for Cygnus and LabTek -- here we've got two groups of people
(saintly people) writing a gcc for Windows 95 and NT.  Both of them
compile C.  One of them compiles C++.  One of them compiles Ada 95.
It's a virtual certainty that the same problems are being solved twice.
It's also a virtual certainty that every day the two common cores of
the compilers move another millimeter farther apart, and the chances
of forever having to have two compilers on my machine increase another"

What on earth are you talking about. LabTek is not writing a "gcc for 
Windows 95"! The port of GNAT for NT uses the current release of gcc
from FSF with a few extra patches which represent changes present
in the current development version of FSF gcc which are necessary
for GNAT (the maintanence of the FSF version of gcc, which is what
Labtek -- and all other versions of GNAT -- uses, is under the
control and supervision of Richard Kenner of ACT and NYU)

The Cygnus development of gcc is kept syncrhonized with the FSF
development, and Cygnus fixes and improvements are incorporated
into the FSF release.

Bob, you really ought to take the effort to find more about what
is going on and how gcc works before posting a message which is
so confused. 

"One of them compiles C++"

more massive confusion. gcc is a driver program that can call cc1, gnat1,
or cc1plus etc, which are the actual compilers for the different languages.
Each of these compilers incorporates the backend code generator etc that
is a fundamental part of gcc.

If you get the latest version of the gcc driver from either FSF or Cygnus
then they should be, barring minor revision shifts, identical, and either
of them will be happy to load the C++ compiler or the GNAT compiler.

No problems are being solved twice

Nothing is moving apart

If you want to have C++ and Ada on your machine, you definitely need
two compilers, a C++ compiler and an Ada cmpiler. These can both be
loaded using the gcc driver. You definitely do NOT need two copies of
the gcc driver, so once you set things up properly on your machine,
you have one copy of gcc, which compiles C, C++, or Ada (or for that
matter Chill, or Fortran 77, or Objective C, or ...) depending on the
extension of the file (or the -x switch).