Re: c2ada bug report filed

[Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>]

Jerry <lanceboyle@qwest.net> writes:

> I don't expect much handholding here but I thought that I should at
> least report my results.

Thanks. I have to admit I joined the C2Ada project because it seemed it
might come in handy, and I really like things to be done portably if at
all possible. I'm far from an expert in the package. I suspect you'd
need to add some project-specific tweaks for a particular
project. Certainly "c2ada /usr/include/tcl.h" on its own doesn't produce
anything remotely useful; I'm not sure what Terry Westley did to get it
to provide the initial translation for Tcl/TK in TASH.

> I updated my system to OS X 10.6.7 and Xcode to 3.2.6.
>
> After downloading c2ada from SVN, rev 23, I cd-ed to the distribution
> directory and built by ./setup and make which created c2ada. I then
> ran c2ada (still cd-ed to the distribution dir) on two very small C
> programs in another directory. The first one
>
> int main(void)
> {
>     int a;
>     a = 1;
>     return 0;
> }
>
> resulted in a useful Ada package. However, the second one
>
> #include <stdio.h>
> int main(void)
> {
>     printf("Hello World\n");
>     return 0;
> }
>
> resulted in just a skeleton Ada package with no useful lines. (Other
> files were also created.) The terminal output had a few lines that
> looked troublesome. I tried with -I/usr/include which is where stdio.h
> is stored but it made no difference in the output, at least with
> respect to the corresponding Ada package.

As the web page http://c2ada.sourceforge.net/c2ada.html says,

   Using C2Ada is a way to lessen the work in translating C headers into
   Ada, to produce a binding, and in translating whole C programs into
   Ada, producing a translation. C2Ada can do about 80% to 90% of the
   work automatically but it still takes some manual work to do the last
   10% or 20%.

   The technology for translating C headers is more mature than the
   technology for translating C functions and statments. C2Ada does not
   translate C++, just C.

Personally I always thought that it was a mistake to take on the
translation of C body files (IYSWIM). I suppose one could make some
simple translations for printf(), but it's not really Ada-compatible.