AdaMagic documentation

AdaMagic documentation

[Ivan Levashev]

Hello!

Trying to do something useful with AdaMagic. There is a serious problem
with not having asm.js/flascc/nacl/pnacl/wasm targets, so why not try to
use AdaMagic for it.

The current owners (MapuSoft) are not into Ada, it seems. They seem to
have got a license and making a rent from it, not doing anything useful.
For them, Ada is legacy, that's how they market their products.

They provide a little documentation, but it is way too scarce for
advanced use. For instance, it is stated to support a "subset of Ada
2005". I always thought it's about Object.Method, 32-bit characters and
other simple improvements, as this "Method (Object)" shame is the first
thing I would leave in the past and never recall. But I checked, and
both features don't work in AdaMagic. MapuSoft haven't found time to
implement it so far, it seems. Well, thanks for putting a demo online at
least. Previously AdaMagic was a complete mystery. Thanks to MapuSoft
it's not anymore.

But I wonder what is this subset about then? It's so uncomfortable to
fall down to Ada 95. If there is anything from our millenium, I'd like
to know it and use.

Also, emscripten has a specific memory model. Single octet can be
anywhere, but 4-byte integer must be aligned at boundary. I can see no
obvious way to specify it in the config. Storage unit is still 8-bit
IIUC in this case.

There is no documentation for writing AdaMagic config at all. And I miss
CLI tools arguments documentation. Like, I know that -cppn makes use of
C++ namespaces and -cppe makes use of C++ exceptions, but there are
undocumented -cppa and -cppc, and it's better to read about them than
figuring out.

Found outdated "documentation" here:
http://www.ada-auth.org/cpl/reports/ACATR048.txt

Is there anything more fresh? I suppose to open WayBack Machine, open
ex-vendor website and find PDFs there, but I can't see them neither on
Intermetrics website snapshot, nor on AverStart website, nor on SofCheck
website. Is it secret or what, I don't get why is it this way?

Best Regards,
Ivan Levashev,
Barnaul

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