Re: Ada to Ada Translator ?

[Optikos <optikos@verizon.net>]

On Saturday, May 18, 2019 at 10:26:38 AM UTC-5, foo wong wrote:
> Thanks Simon but this is still weird-weird-wierd
> 
> It's just a bunch of games. I personally can't keep it straight.
> 
> If a small company wanted to create an instrument with Ada embedded on let's say an ARM based circuit
> board, there is just so much non-sense to deal with in the Ada world and it's just so much easier with
> C++.
> 
> Adacore is our leader in the free software world and they are leading us into the abyss .
> 
> We really need another compiler. One that is doesn't play license games and that is designed to solve
> the problem Ada was created for, embedded parallel hardware use.
> 
> I am not sure if I can do this but I will fork the older GMGPL code to create it, if I can. It will be small and
> simple, like the TinyC compiler vs GCC

Patrick, I just investigated GnuCOBOL a little.  As a generator of C code without linking to GCC object code in any way (most especially GnuCOBOL does not dump out information extracted from a C-language AST from GCC), GnuCOBOL does not evoke any of the Target Code versus intermediate representation clauses of the Runtime Library Exception.  Mimicking this architectural principle for your yacc/bison-based and flex-based Ada-to-Ada translator would likewise not risk running afoul of the RLE.

With that it mind, why be interested in the 3.14p release of GNAT, which was the last release licensed under GMGPL?  Your Ada-to-Ada translator would be a mere user of current FSF GNAT (as if it were a human being), not linked to GNAT.  Your generated-Ada source code would run no more licensing risk than any other human-authored source code that gets compiled by FSF GNAT that has the RLE.  (Although stay away from GPL Community Edition of GNAT though if you want to avoid forcing all users' to be strict GPLv3.)

Or were you thinking of using GNAT compiler and its Ada AST in your Ada-to-Ada translator?  There would be license issues galore in this variant.

Btw, your Ada-to-Ada translator would effectively function as the #1 and #3 report of bugs in GNAT and publishing of fixes that I mention along another branch of this thread; the representation of the bug reports in GNAT would be source code instead of a bug database.  That alone would be a valuable contribution to the Ada community as a whole, especially the GNAT subset.

[I am not a lawyer.  This posting is merely a remembrance of my understanding for my own usage.  Please consult a copyright-law & contract-law lawyer if these matters affect you.]