Re: Ada to C translator

[kst@aonix.com (Keith Thompson)]

In <1997Jan22.062734.1@eisner> kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen) writes:
[...]
> The consensus in comp.lang.ada from the _many_ times this has been
> addressed in the past is that no general purpose translator could
> be built since the semantics of Ada are a superset of the semantics
> of C or C++ (no tasking for example).  Please read archives of the
> comp.lang.ada rather than starting the discussion up from scratch.

I don't agree that a general purpose translator is impossible.  After all,
we know that a general purpose Ada to machine code translator is possible,
and machine code does not inherently support tasking.  The trick is
that you'd have to find a way to support or emulate tasking (and other
Ada-specific features) in the generated C.  The logical way to do this
is to generate calls to runtime support routines, possibly written in Ada.

Of course, this doesn't imply that an Ada to C translator is necessarily a
good idea.  Generating legible and maintainable C from Ada is a daunting
task.  Even if you could do it, it would be sort of like transmuting
gold into lead.  8-)}

There have been proposals to use C as an intermediate language to simplify
porting an Ada compiler to new architectures.  I don't know how practical
this turned out to be.  Note that C code generated as an intermediate
language is almost certain to be illegible and unmaintainable.

-- 
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) kst@aonix.com <http://www.aonix.com> <*>
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