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From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: ada -> C translator
Date: 1997/04/09
Message-ID: <dewar.860617922@merv>#1/1
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Organization: New York University
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-04-09T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


Fergus said

<<What I had in mind was not a small subset Ada toy; I had in mind
something that could be validated.>>

Oh dear! I thought that at this stage there was *no one* left who thought
that validated meant usable -- oh well. Fergus I guess you are too young
to remember the early versions of Ada/Ed :-)

Those who do were hopefully permanently cured of the naive assumption
that validated means usable. Ada/Ed was very much a toy compiler, and
yes, you certainly could create an Ada/ed equivalent in portable C, but
I do not think that is what is interesting.

I am giving up on trying to convince you since I don't think you have a
sufficient frame of reference. If you want to prove me wrong, go ahead
and translate a decent sized Ada program which uses the features of the
language, including those in Annexes A-C reasonabley extensively, into
the kind of C, and write the runtime that goes with it.

Yes, I know that's a big job -- in fact remember that my contention is
that it is an impossible job. Your work on Mercury is not even close to
an example for all sorts of reasons.

So, bottom line, I say that X does not exist and cannot exist, where X is

a completely portable, reasonably complete, reasonabley efficient translation
of Ada into C, and you say it can exist.

Fine, since we are talking about existence, I see the only final proof
being actual existence!