Re: Adapting an Ada compiler to generate 8051 code (Again?! ;-)

["Luke A. Guest" <laguest@archeia.com>]

On 02/04/2021 00:43, Randy Brukardt wrote:

>> I know of the original Janus for Z80, never used it, is it a real Ada
>> compiler or is it a Pascal like Ada?
> 
> It was an Ada 83 subset. Don't remember the exact details, but it covered a
> substantial part of the language, including packages and exceptions. The
> validated Ada 83 compilers were direct descendants, and the current compiler
> is directly descended from that.

Ah.

>> Have you considered compiling it as a cross compiler on Linux?
> 
> Sadly, we've lost the back-end. When I was moving and going to junk the last
> machine with a working 5 1/4" floppy, I decided to copy all of the old stuff
> into the version control system. But I wasn't able to read the disks with
> the source to the last pass.
> 
> I didn't concern myself too much with losing that, as that backend predated
> J-Code and thus any modern version would need to be rewritten anyway to mate
> with a modern front-end. I did manage to recover the runtime, which would be
> more work to reproduce anyway -- especially the floating point library.

Have you considered sticking the front end onto github? Writing a back 
end shouldn't be too hard. Would be an interesting project for someone, 
and also to get it up to complete Ada 83.