Re: Please, Not MachTen! (Was: learning Ada on a Mac)

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

Spencer said

"I was pleased to see that GNAT was available on the Mac platform. I was
tickled pink! I quickly followed the link, and. . .
. . .was very disappointed. The fact that the GNAT Ada compiler was
available was heartening, but that it needs MachTen to run in is not."

Our experience with Machten is much more positive, probably you were
working with an early version, this system is very much in development
mode, and each new version we have seen is much more complete and
much more solid. Other people using the MAC port have had similar
experience.

As I mentioned before, we had essentially the choice between Machten
which is close to a standard Unix, and therefore familiar to a lot of
people, or using Apple's proprietary interface which is far less
familiar. We certainly need a full featured command line interface
for running gcc, and of course gcc hosts more cleanly under a unix
interface anyway. The applications will run under System 7, but
the compiler does require Machten.

Anyway, maybe you should not give up on your *dream* so soon, and give
Machten another try. Presumably if you have a license already, the
upgrade is easily obtained. 

I think by the time the GNAT/Mac project is completed, in another 6 weeks or
so, that the version of Machten that will be released soon after will be
quite capable and quite affordable. Watch for details.

P.S. The only other source for an Ada compiler on the Mac that I am
familiar with (not counting some not well supported Ada 83 compilers
that are still around) is the Intermetrics JBM based compiler. This
is a subset so far (e.g. no tasking), but generates Java compatible
output, which is interesting for some applications, and eventually
a full implementation is planned.