Re: Cheap/Free Ada (was: Ada9x Transition)

[jls@rutabaga.Rational.COM (Jim Showalter)]

>My fantasy, inspired by a well-placed Ada-head who shall remain unnamed, is
>an Ada front end for the GNU compilers. This would open up about a zillion
>targets (basically anything that has a GNU C compiler).

Actually, that's a pretty clever idea. I'm not too jazzed about the
debugging issues (ever try to debug C++ that has been "mangled" [Stroustrup's
term, not mine!] into C? Not pretty), but other than that it could
work pretty well. This is, in fact, one of the reasons Stroustrup insisted
on C compatibility when he devised C++: he wanted to piggyback off all
the C compilers in the universe to get free backends on most targets.
Sure beats writing a compiler from scratch.
--
***** DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed herein are my own, except in
      the realm of software engineering, in which case I've borrowed
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