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Re: GNAT is required to build ada
From: Robert Dewar <dewar@adacore.com>
Date: Sat, 03 Nov 2007 18:40:56 -0400
> David Miller wrote:
>
> > But we don't need a fortran compiler to compile the gfortran compiler,
> > and we don't need a c++ compiler to compile the g++ compiler, and we
> > don't even need a java compiler to compile the gcj compiler.
>
> That's because they are written in C
The MONO C# compiler is written in C#, and amazingly they make it work
somehow that you can bootstrap without having a C# compiler.
> > Sorry, I just couldn't resist. This justification for the ADA
> > situation is just about as absurd as it gets :)
>
> Well the GNAT front end is written in Ada, there is no magic
> available for compiling Ada without an Ada compiler!
You can do it, MONO C# can.
> Well as long as you have a C compiler to compile g++, you can obviously
> deal with C++ code, but there is no getting around that for GNAT
> given that the front end is coded in Ada!
MONO can do it, so could ADA.
The trick is to have a program that, even if massively suboptimal, can
compile ADA code for the purposes of bootstrapping the ADA compiler
and is written in C.