From: Michael Feldman Subject: Re: Ada and djgpp To: elston AT cave DOT arc DOT nasa DOT gov (Mark Elston) Date: Wed, 15 Mar 1995 19:15:55 -0500 (EST) Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu > > I have received quite a bit of mail lately about the GNAT product. I > didn't realize there were so many people who wanted to use Ada along > with C++. There are lots! > > If you look at sw-eng.falls-church.va.us there are several directories > of Ada related material (from Ada 83 to Ada 9X) including the Language > Reference Manual (LRM) and Annotated LRM. Highly recommended. Also see my .sig regarding WWW sites. > > I have not had time to do much more than run the tests but I expect > that in the next month I will do some more extensive testing (I hope). I've been using GNAT extensively on Solaris, DOS, and OS/2. It is a very nice piece of work. It will be completed by summer; it is _quite_ usable now. I follow discussions about C++ templates with great interest; Ada has had working templates for 10 years, and GNAT does them fine too. No tasking yet on DOS, but we are working on that here at GW now. Also, GNAT is about 250k lines of (mostly) Ada 95, (a bit of C around the edges) so its writers get a lot of opportunity to test the compiler on itself! GNAT has been compiling itself since July 1993, and its own sources contain more and more of the Ada 95 extensions with each new release (new releases about once a month now). [snip] > I just wanted to pass on the information for anyone else who would > like to experiment with a very promising Ada 9X compiler. I think it > is great that we have, in essence, first crack at a language -- even > before the commercial world jumps into the fray. (Of course the > standard has yet to be finalized, so the commercial world will > probably catch up soon after that happens). Just a small correction - the first Ada standard was adopted in 1983, incorporating such things as generic templates, exceptions, operator overloading, and language-defined multitasking. There are validated Ada 83 compilers for every platform one could imagine, mostly commercial. The _revised_ Ada standard was officially published by ISO on Feb. 15, 1995, so Ada 95 is official. It is an ISO, an ANSI, and a FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) standard. The revision adds the rest of OOP to the language - type extension, dynamic polymorphism (Ada 83 has static), etc. The U.S. DoD, which has been the sponsor of Ada 83 and Ada 95, and in fact has funded most of the GNAT development, maintains its commitment to Ada but prefers _not_ to stamp Ada 95 with a "military standard" label; better for it to be simply a commercial standard, as it is now. The GNAT Team expects to be able to validate (using the government- sponsored validation suite) in the summer. I realize this is mainly a DOS group, but you might be interested to know that Silicon Graphics has made a significant commitment to both Ada in general and GNAT in particular. I have heard SGI folks rave about Ada's multitasking stuff in doing their animation and virtual-reality work. They have stated that their interest is not especially government-related, rather they think that GNAT will help them sell hardware. I've seen some very spectacular video-game-type demos mixing Ada and C++. Sorry for the digression - back to djgpp. :-) Mike Feldman ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Michael B. Feldman - chair, SIGAda Education Working Group Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science The George Washington University - Washington, DC 20052 USA 202-994-5919 (voice) - 202-994-0227 (fax) - mfeldman AT seas DOT gwu DOT edu (Internet) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ One, two, three ways an underdog: Ada fan, Mac fan, Old Liberal Democrat ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ada on the WWW: http://lglwww.epfl.ch/Ada/ or http://info.acm.org/sigada/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------