Re: Ada files now checked in

[dewar at gnat dot com]

<<Would it be possible to supply a 'java' (or some other engine) version
of the ADA compiler that could be used to bootstrap it?  You would then
only need to supply a pre-compiled ADA-to-bytecode compiler (in
bytecode)
to be able to bootstrap the ADA compiler.
>>

First, a little lesson for everyone :-)
Ada is not an acronym, but a woman's name (Ada Augusta Byron, daughter of the
poet, given credit by some as the first programmer, since she worked on
developing algorithms for Babbage). So Ada folks feel almost as strongly
about using Ada rather than ADA as some folks feel about using GNU/Linux
instead of L????

To answer the question, yes, everything is possible, but that's a huge
project. Once upon a time we actually thought about what it would take
to build GNAT without GNAT installed, but since it has never really been
a significant practical problem (and since these days there are systems
which don't come with C anyway), we have never bothered.

After all, you could also rewrite the whole of GNAT in C :-)