Re: ??? Help!: how to do unconstraned arrays/records???

[Stephen Leake <Stephen.Leake@gsfc.nasa.gov>]

al johnston <johnstona@avionics2.robins.af.mil> writes:

> > Why are you using an obsolete language at this stage. I can understand the
> > cases of large scale legacy projects that committed some time ago to the
> > technology, but it is hard to believe that this is your case.
> 
> we have 500k of 83 code for an embedded system.  we build on a solaris
> box, and the target is a force 2ce (sparc2) cpu card using vxWorks.
> 
> <snip> 
> gnat sounded promisig, but I would have to port the ada runtime
> for vxworks myself...  The real kicker was the screwy way
> gnat does makes and handles file names and preprocessor directives.
> well, its screwie relitive to the vads handles them.  it looks like it
> would tak 6-8 man months to get ported to gnat, most of that spent
> reformating files and creating make files....right now
> the time is not there...

I suggest you take another look. gnat uses the program 'gnatmake'
_instead of_ makefiles. VADS Ada 83 has nothing comparable. 

Also, gnat provides the utility 'gnatchop', which reads all your
current Ada files and outputs new files using the default gnat naming
conventions.

To convert from VADS to gnat, delete all makefiles, run gnatchop, then
run gnatmake. Presto! So this should take a couple hours, not six months!

-- Stephe