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From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: Urgent question: malloc and ada...
Date: 1998/05/02
Message-ID: <dewar.894114612@merv>#1/1
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References: <352A79C2.15FB7483@nathan.gmd.de>
 <EACHUS.98Apr30171942@spectre.mitre.org> <1998Apr30.180141.1@eisner>
 <matthew_heaney-ya023680003004981723000001@news.ni.net>
 <dewar.894029393@merv> <1998May1.104407.1@eisner>
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Date: 1998-05-02T00:00:00+00:00
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Larry said

<<Certainly more than C.  On Alpha only, C is being used for some of the
innards, particular for brand new modules.  As far as _calls_ to the
operating system are concerned, however, the System Service Dispatcher
is written in VAX assembly language, on both VAX and Alpha, so that is
the language to which one interfaces system service calls.  Since there
is a tight calling standard, however, it really does not cause trouble.
I find it hard to understand the tower of babble some other operating
systems have constructed through a lack of system-specific standards.
>>


Note here that Larry is agreeing with the proposed criterion for defining
the standard C compiler *even* in the case of VMS, which is the one case
in which you might have thought that C was not used in the operating system.

So, just to recapture the interesting point (I forget who made it). The
proposal is that in practice, a working definition of what the standard
C compiler means is that it is the C compiler used for wrting the operating
system.

However, I don't see any analogous way of getting a feel for what the
standard Fortran or COBOL compiler may be, and here you definitely need
to find out from the vendor which Fortran compiler(s) or COBOL compiler(s)
their Ada compiler interfaces to.

Of course, as noted elsewhere in this thread, it is perfectly reasonable
(and indeed expected) for an Ada compiler to have multiple calling 
conventions if there are incompatible other-language compilers.