19 Jun
2026
19 Jun
'26
5:53 a.m.
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:
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
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.