Re: Kickstarter for beginning work on a new open-source Compiler

[Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>]

Luke A. Guest <laguest@archeia.com> writes:

> Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org> wrote:
>> Luke A. Guest <laguest@archeia.com> writes:
>> 
>>> Peter Chapin <PChapin@vtc.vsc.edu> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> IDE interact with existing compilers? Ada, in particular, does have
>>>> an ASIS standard that can guide, to some extent, the design of
>>>> abstract program representations.
>>> 
>>> ASIS doesn't have Ada 2012 support, yet. Unless there are unofficial
>>> extensions, do you have links?
>> 
>> GCC 4.8 supports ASIS to the extent that this
>> 
>>    package Ada2012 is
>>       subtype Even is Natural with Dynamic_Predicate => Even mod 2 = 0;
>>    end Ada2012;
>
> So the Ada 2012 extensions are in that package?
>
> No offence, but I have no idea what I'm looking at (the XML stuff).

Um. Sorry.

I wrote that package to use one of the Ada 2012 extensions
(aspects). The XML demonstrates that GNAT's internal representation, as
well as supporting aspects (a given), is exported to the ASIS
environment in a usable way: the fact you can see <aspect_specification>
in the output indicates (to me!) that there is an enumeration literal
An_Aspect_Specification in the GNAT ASIS library.

Likewise, after further invesitigation, An_Expression_Function_Declaration.

Of course this is all GNAT-specific; I don't know what the success rate
is for AdaCore implementations to end up as ASIS specs, or whether the
ASIS folks are actively considering updates for Ada 2012.