Re: ada -> C translator

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

<<I was under the impression that ANSI C did not provide anything
equivalent to Ada tasking.  Therefore I thought that a translator
would have to choose between portability and feature completeness.>>

Wrong level of thinking. At the generated code level, tasking translates
into calls to the runtime library. Deciding to generate C does not remove
the task of coding a runtime library -- presumably this would be coded in
C, although it could also be coded in Ada (using the compiler to bootstrap,
the GNAT compiler uses VERY little of the runtime in the compiler itself).
But all tasking would be accomplished by using either the existing GNAT
(or other Ada technology) runtime, or creating a new runtime specially for
the purposes of this translator.

Have a look at the -gnatdg output from GNAT, you will see that, although
basically still Ada, it is a MUCH simplified subset of Ada.