Re: GNAT for OpenVMS on Alpha

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

Jim Hopper asks

"Speaking of VMS ;-) One of our people is porting Vax Ada code to gnat
on solaris and needs the specs for the vax ada starlet libraries is
this available anywhere??"

Starlet is a Digital proprietary product. Here is the copyright notice
from the spec (I hope copying the copyright does not violate the
copyright :-)

--   ) Digital Equipment Corporation 1992, 1994. All rights reserved.
--
--   Restricted Rights: Use, duplication, or disclosure by the U.S.
--   Government is subject to restrictions as set forth in subparagraph
--   (c) (1) (ii) of DFARS 252.227-7013, or in FAR 52.227-19, or in FAR
--   52.227-14 Alt. III, as applicable.
--
--   This software is proprietary to and embodies the confidential
--   technology of Digital Equipment Corporation. Possession, use, or
--   copying of this software and media is authorized only pursuant to a
--   valid written license from Digital or an authorized sublicensor.

So even getting the text of the spec can be problematical. Furthremore,
having the spec itself won't do you much good, since it assumes that
you are 100% familiar with the contents of the relevant Digital manuals.
In fact if you know the form of the system calls in VMS, you can probably
pretty reliably guess what the Ada calls to starlet are doing, since this
is a thin binding.

Note however that it relies heavily on DEC Ada 83 extensions (pragmas and
attributes). These are all available in GNAT (on all targets, although some
highly VMS specific features, such as AST_Entry, are available only on VMS)

By the way, the character that came out as ) in the first character
of the notice above should be a circle with a little r inside.

Users of the VMS GNAT port on a DEC Alpha machine will be able to get
proper licensed access to use Starlet and all the other relevant DEC
packages, but only for use on a VMS system.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies