Moved comments here from main text. Reorganized into threads.--
buzco
Really only used anymore in US Department of Defense stuff. Oh yeah, and Ada95, the most popular Ada compiler actually translates your code to C, then compiles the C. I love that.
- Ada95 is not a compiler, it is a version of Ada, the most recent version, I believe. I am also skeptical of the idea that Ada is "really only used anymore" in the US DOD.
- Do you mean GNAT (GNU Ada Translater) when writing "Ada95"? This is no translater to C any longer but a frontend to the GNU Compiler Collection, as the C or the Java frontends are. By the way, it is _not_ used only by DOD staff and it is a highly capable language. In contrast to the popular misbelief it produces rather fast code (comparable to C).
- Make that C, C++, Forth, FORTRAN, Java, Objective C and Pascal front ends! May be others! --buzco
- The team behind Gnat used in the beginning a proprietary Ada compiler and used that to build an compiler which implemented a subset of Ada big enough to support building itself. Now the team left that proprietary compiler in the dust. After that it was a simple matter of extending that they already have while using the base to build the next more evolved version.
- Gnat until 3.11 or so (ca 1999) needed to generate a C stub for the sake of elaboration but that liability is no more !!
- GNAT never was a Ada-to-C translator !
- cfront was a c++-to-c translator !
Ada is used in a few compiler theory books because of its comprehensiveness and elegance.
Should there be a section on primary users of a language like ada and how their requirements affected the language?
Ada has some tastes of Pascal still but not one of the bad ones. --
Janet Davis
(list of possible topics moved from main page)
What about
- how Ada tied into formal specification languages?
- how Ada is very stongly typed
- packages in Ada
- concurrency support
- real time/embedded system support ???
- how Ada suffered from design by DOC committee/specifications and required super-fast hardware for compilation/debugging.
- ?? others
I think the Steelman language requirements page would be better as part of this entry, or maybe a subpage, as it isn't really of interest except in the context of Ada. Anyone agree/disagree? --Matthew Woodcraft
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