Re: [?] GNU g77 FORTRAN compiler witten in C?

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

Ralph said

<<: How would you port it to an architecture that has no Ada compiler? Once you
: have a GNAT development system running, you can retarget the Ada compiler you
: have. You can then compile programs for that previously unsupported platform.
: You then compile the compiler itself and get it running on that platform!
: (Easier said than done, of course, but in principle that is what you would do)>>

This is much more than theory. The above described approach has been 
successfully used to move GNAT to a large number of machines, including
many ports done by volunteers with zero help from the GNAT folks, e.g.
the DOS port appeared out of the blue this way, as did the Amiga port.
Yes, you need to know gcc reasonably well to do this, but there are lots
of people who know enough.

Originally we thought we would have to somehow address the issue of how
to port the system in a pure C manner, but in practice this has turned
out to be a non-issue. Indeed porting GNAT to a new target at the very
basic level of getting the compipler to run non-taskin programs is
pretty straightforward. The harder part is porting the tools and the
tasking.