On 6/18/2026 4:58 PM, J. David Bryan via cctalk wrote:
On Thursday, June 18, 2026 at 14:10, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote:
As for translating from one language to another, that was pretty much
standard practice for a long time. GNAT Ada produced C.
The comp.lang.ada FAQ disagrees:
Last-posted: 22 April 1996
comp.lang.ada
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
[...]
4.2.1: GNAT, The GNU NYU Ada Translator -- An Ada 95 Compiler
GNAT is a compiler for Ada 95 that accepts Ada 95 source code and
generates executable (machine) code (GNAT is a compiler and does not,
repeat: DOES NOT, generate C code). It is based on the Free Software
Foundation (FSF)'s gcc, a portable compilation system for a variety of
languages.
From "The GNAT Project: A GNU-Ada 9X Compiler" by Edmond Schonberg and
Bernard Banner of the New York University Courant Institute:
The front-end of the GNAT compiler is thus written in Ada 9X. The
back-end of the compiler is the back-end of GCC proper, extended to
meet the needs of Ada semantics.
I have read that the "Translator" part of the name may be the source of the
confusion.
Well, maybe my memory is getting flawed (it was 25 years ago and I am
75 now) but we started using GNAT right from the very beginning at the
University I worked at. One of our professors was a friend of Dewar.
We jumped on the Ada bandwagon immediately replacing Pascal as our
CS1 and CS2 language with Ada. (For a number of years I got irate emails
from previous students bitching about the fact that they spent so much
time on Ada and went out into a workplace that didn't use it.) I
distinctly remember working with C output. Unless there was another
Ada compiler at the time. I will have to try and go back thru my
massive repository and check it out again.
bill
