From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Received: by 2002:a02:1cc6:: with SMTP id c189mr55986265jac.119.1558529823110; Wed, 22 May 2019 05:57:03 -0700 (PDT) X-Received: by 2002:aca:ea05:: with SMTP id i5mr7170110oih.51.1558529822937; Wed, 22 May 2019 05:57:02 -0700 (PDT) Path: eternal-september.org!reader01.eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!weretis.net!feeder6.news.weretis.net!feeder.usenetexpress.com!feeder-in1.iad1.usenetexpress.com!border1.nntp.dca1.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!u76no132446ita.0!news-out.google.com!p73ni206itp.0!nntp.google.com!u76no132444ita.0!postnews.google.com!glegroupsg2000goo.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: Wed, 22 May 2019 05:57:02 -0700 (PDT) In-Reply-To: Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: glegroupsg2000goo.googlegroups.com; posting-host=2607:f2c0:95bf:9100:7c7d:8197:2b6:f19e; posting-account=XGBE5QoAAABsRez5Xjd0KD5FXhbiCPL- NNTP-Posting-Host: 2607:f2c0:95bf:9100:7c7d:8197:2b6:f19e References: <100ad407-090e-4316-9746-a4469568b53e@googlegroups.com> <477352cf-80d0-458c-b64a-4605557fef8f@googlegroups.com> <36cf3be3-0ab0-48d4-bffa-e49c624e73ff@googlegroups.com> User-Agent: G2/1.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 Message-ID: Subject: Re: Ada to Ada Translator ? From: foo wong Injection-Date: Wed, 22 May 2019 12:57:03 +0000 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Xref: reader01.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:56367 Date: 2019-05-22T05:57:02-07:00 List-Id: Unfortunately, this seems like a typical thread here. Lots of bickering and= a lot theory. Very little co-operation or offers to join in to help. First and foremost, I wanted to bring an idea to the Ada community that mig= ht help others. I have very little time to program and I would love it if A= da was not tied so tightly to a company that is not helping it to succeed. Sorry, I am only going to add to the bickering... I am not sure if G.B is a= ffiliated with Adacore but this statement makes me think so: "Can AdaCore, or any other Ada vendor, pursue a strategy of giving away a free compiler that allows use in commercial closed source projects?" Anyone that is allowed to commit to GCC should not be asking this sort of r= hetorical question. All of the other languages supported by GCC are intende= d to make commercial software easy to develop with GCC. Are the folks behin= d the other languages withholding code to make more platforms available or = releasing GCC code much later then their other offerings posted elsewhere. = GNAT is the odd one out and it's an obvious sales ploy. =20 There are so many brilliant people here, if you guys worked together, Ada w= ould not have to be in this state. Randy's posts are helpful in that now I = know that Yacc/Flex is enough to build a compiler and I am not even proposi= ng a compiler but rather an Ada to Ada source translator. All libraries are written in Ada. Just to stick with the topic I brought up= earlier, if nested subprograms were translated into more primitive Ada cod= e, then the translator would translate any library code. The only grammar t= hat is required is for core Ada. Also I would like to mention that the worst thing that Adacore is doing is = with holding new targets. They bought up Ada vendors that had support for v= arious targets but they did not merge this into GNAT FSF. Now there is supp= ort for ARM but there could have been long ago but the ARM support is comin= g with strings attached. I am going to receive a severe mailing list beating for saying this but it = seems to me that Adacore has lead FLOSS Ada to a point where it is a fish o= ut of water. It's great that it is being used for games and web servers and such but Ada= has gills and fins, it's supposed to be in the water. This is not what it was designed to do. It's supposed to be used to control= missiles and tanks and could be used for non-military purposes as spin-off= . Ada 95 added OO and there there is a ton of stuff like interfaces and wha= tnot but is any of this needed to fire off a tank shell or missile? Where is the target support! I personally don't want to create weapons rather scientific instruments. Based on this website: https://wiki.osdev.org/Ada_Bare_bones These are the parts that the translator would need to translate into more p= rimitive Ada code: """ pragma Discard_Names; pragma Restrictions (No_Enumeration_Maps); pragma Normalize_Scalars; pragma Restrictions (No_Exception_Propagation); pragma Restrictions (No_Finalization); pragma Restrictions (No_Tasking); pragma Restrictions (No_Protected_Types); pragma Restrictions (No_Delay); pragma Restrictions (No_Recursion); pragma Restrictions (No_Allocators); pragma Restrictions (No_Dispatch); pragma Restrictions (No_Implicit_Dynamic_Code); pragma Restrictions (No_Secondary_Stack); """ but even some of these could be skipped over. If I am the one that ends up = doing this, I will only be focused on hardware embedded Ada and I will focu= s on new targets and not every last corner-case feature