Resources -- Compilers

Free Development Systems

GW-Ada/Ed for Apple Macintosh

Ada 83 Program Development Environment for Apple Macintosh

December 10, 1995 (Happy Birthday, Lady Ada Lovelace) 

Michael B. Feldman   (mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu)
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science 
The George Washington University Washington, DC 20052 
(202) 994-5919 (voice) 
(202) 994-0227 (fax)

We are happy to announce a new release of GW-Ada/Ed for the Apple Macintosh family of computers. This software is now available by anonymous ftp from ftp.gwu.edu, in the directory pub/ada/gw-adaed/mac, and in the Public Ada Library at wuarchive.wustl.edu, in the directory languages/ada/compiler/adaed/gwu/mac.

The new release does not add any functionality, but corrects a number of bugs and is significantly faster. A "fat binary" version for 68020/30/40 and PPC Macs can be found in gwadafat.sit; a special version for 68000 Macs is in gwada68k.sit. System 7 or higher is required.

Thanks again to Fabrizio Oddone of Turin, Italy, for the splendid maintenance work on this system!

This project was sponsored by The George Washington University, and in part by the United States Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) under contract #FY3592-93-10234, administered by Phillips Laboratory, Kirtland AFB, NM 87117-5776.

Copyright (C) 1994, Manuel A. Perez and Michael Bliss Feldman

This program is free software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

I. ABOUT THE GW-Ada/Ed-Mac DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT

GW-Ada/Ed-Mac is a development environment built around the New York University (NYU) AdaEd compiler/interpreter. It allows the editing, compiling, binding and execution of Ada 83 programs. GW-Ada/Ed-Mac was supervised by Prof. Michael B. Feldman. Manuel A. Perez, a GWU doctoral student in Computer Science, is responsible for the Macintosh version, including the editor and developer shell. Fabrizio Oddone of Turin, Italy, has been maintaining the system recently.

NYU's original README file is included in the distribution, for your information. In summary, Ada/Ed was developed several years ago, and validated under the Ada Compiler Validation Capability suite then in effect. Ada/Ed is a full-scale compiler, which generates instructions for a virtual machine. Execution is carried out by an interpreter for this virtual machine.

Ada/Ed handles nearly all of Ada 83, including tasking and generics. Not supported are a number of machine-dependent features, most of which are not sensible to support in a virtual-machine environment.

The multi-window editor follows the usual Macintosh menu and command-key conventions. Source files are limited to 32k characters, however. Standard output is sent to a subset-VT100 console window, so that cursor addressing and other ANSI escape sequences are supported. We think that the system will be fun to use and as easy to work with as most Mac programs are. Students who have tested the system comment that it, like GW-Ada/Ed-DOS, is a great way to learn Ada.

II. ACQUIRING AND INSTALLING GW-Ada/Ed-Mac FROM AN FTP ARCHIVE

System requirements - a Mac with a 68030 or 68040 processor, System 7, and at least 4mb of RAM. You should have around 10mb free space on your hard disk, too. The program will not run under System 6; it appears to be OK with a 68020 processor. You are welcome to try, but we make no promises.

The distribution contains 7 files, as given below. If you are interested only in using GW-Ada/Ed-Mac but not modifying it, you need not copy the first file, which contains the source code (in C and C++).

This software is available by anonymous ftp from ftp.gwu.edu, in the directory pub/ada/gw-adaed/mac, and in the Public Ada Library at wuarchive.wustl.edu, in the directory languages/ada/compiler/adaed/gwu/mac. 

-rwxrwxr-x   1 root     adauser  2020836 Apr 27  1995 GWAdaSource.sea.hqx
-rwxrwxr-x   1 root     adauser    94720 Apr 27  1995 adademos.sea
-rwxrwxr-x   1 root     adauser  1006328 Apr 27  1995 c-source.sit
-rwxrwxr-x   1 root     adauser   731392 Dec 12 03:53 gwada68k.sit
-rwxrwxr-x   1 root     adauser  1200256 Dec 12 03:53 gwadafat.sit
-rwxrwxr-x   1 root     adauser      366 Apr 27  1995 packing.list.mac
-rwxrwxr-x   1 root     adauser     6654 Apr 27  1995 readme.mac
-rwxrwxr-x   1 root     adauser    24329 Apr 27  1995 readme.nyu
-rwxrwxr-x   1 root     adauser    12215 Apr 27  1995 userman.mac
readme.mac gives brief instructions for unpacking and installing the system.

readme.nyu is the original NYU document for Ada/Ed; you don't need it to run this system, but it contains useful background information.

userman.mac is a brief user manual for GW-Ada/Ed-Mac; you can open it with any ASCII editor or Word Processor; we recommend that you open it with the GW-Ada/Ed-Mac editor, once you've installed the system.

The files gwadafat.sit and gwada68k.sit are Mac Binary II Stuffit archives. Once you've downloaded the files to your Mac, use Stuffit Expander or another recent Stuffit to unpack the distribution.

Once the unpacked system is available on your Mac, start reading the user manual, which gives a brief tutorial on using the system.

III. Electronic Discussion Group

We are happy to announce the formation of an automated mailing list for discussions about GW-Ada/Ed. We get a lot of repetitive e-mail on this subject, so we decided to make the discussions public. Several of us at GW will be regularly reading and responding to messages from this list.

To use the list, you must first subscribe. Send an e-mail note to listproc@seas.gwu.edu. The subject line must be _empty_; the message should contain the 3 lines 

help
help set
subscribe gw-adaed firstname lastname (substitute your own names!)
The first 2 lines will get you help messages indicating how to use the various options listproc provides; the third line subscribes you to the list. This is all automated; our hands do not touch your message.

Once you get an e-mail acknowledgement of your subscription, you can write to the list by sending e-mail to gw-adaed@seas.gwu.edu. In messages to the list, do _not_ leave the subject line empty.

We hope you will spread around the news of the availability of this list. You do _not_ need Usenet news accesss or ftp to join the list; you need only to be able to send and receive Internet e-mail.

We hope you enjoy the list, and using GW-Ada/Ed!

Page last modified: 1996-10-02