Re: Writing a Mac Ada compiler

[evans@evans.pgh.pa.us (Arthur Evans Jr)]

In article <3jlibk$p5g@gnat.cs.nyu.edu>, dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
wrote about porting GCC to the Mac:

> Also, a port to the Mac assumes a thorough familiarity with System-7,
> which in itself is not easy, the internals of this system are complex.

True, if you make GCC into a stand-alone Mac application.  However, if
you port GCC as an MPW tool, things are _much_ easier.  MPW (Mac
Programmers Workbench) is a development environment that looks sort of
vaguely Unix-like, with a command-line driven interface.  I do all my
development under MPW and have little experience with the Mac OS
interface; I don't suffer the lack (much).

Before Mike Feldman jumps in to make this next (valid) point, I'll make
it myself:  A major advantage of GNAT and GCC is that they are free.
Requiring folks to buy a multi-hundred dollar product to get started is,
to say the least, unfortunate.  Moreover, learning MPW is a serious
impediment to students.  That said, I will jump in to acquire GNAT under
MPW, and I'm sure many others who want to do serious Ada development on
the Mac will do likewise.  Moreover, many of us will gladly pay ACT (or
anyone else) a reasonable maintenance fee.

Were I going to do this project, I would start by studying Metrowerks, a
more modern product than MPW that will likely take over MPW's market.
Since Apple has no visible plans to upgrade MPW for PowerPC, it seems to
be a dead product.  But, I have no idea how easy it is, or even if it's
possible, to implement another language under Metrowerks.  It now
supports C, C++ and Pascal.

Art Evans

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