Re: Ada files now checked in

[dewar at gnat dot com]

<<[I'm not that familiar with Ada, and as a low-level sort of person I
tend to think it ought to be possible to write even complex programs
in a language that completely bypass the vendor-provided runtime.  This
may be Not The Way These Things Are Done in Ada.]
>>

Indeed this is Not The Way These Things Are Done in Ada :-)

To be fair, the compiler does minimize the use of runtime routines, but
it still makes use of many of them, including the complete exception
handling apparatus (which most definitely cannot be replaced by
"direct use of the C runtime libraries". Other examples are secondary
stack handling for functions returning variable length objects (certainly
not something C is used to), the various wide character handling routines,
System.Storage_Elements, enumeration image output. It's not a big list.

But the compiler itself also uses non-vanilla features. an example is
pragma Assert which is used all over the place, but is not part of
Standard Ada.