From: Michael Feldman Subject: GW-Ada/Ed Announced: Free Ada Compilation System for Mac Date: Mon, 24 Jan 1994 18:43:04 -0500 (EST) GW-Ada/Ed Program Development Environment for Apple Macintosh ------------------------------------------------------------- January 1994 Prof. Michael B. Feldman Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science The George Washington University Washington, DC 20052 (202) 994-5253 (voice) (202) 994-5296 (fax) mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Internet) We are happy to announce the first release of GW-Ada/Ed for the Apple Macintosh family of computers. This software is now available by anonymous ftp from wuarchive.wustl.edu, in the directory languages/ada/compilers/adaed/gwu/mac. 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; you can redistribute it as you see fit. We are still too busy developing this system to release the source code; once the project is stable, we will release the sources 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. 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; we have not tested with or with a 68020 processor. You are welcome to try, but we make no promises. You need to copy and download four files, in addition to the readme. -rw-r--r-- 1 mfeldman users 24329 Jan 21 15:56 readme.nyu -rw-r--r-- 1 mfeldman users 155782 Jan 21 15:14 adaprogs.sea.hqx -rwxr-xr-x 1 mfeldman users 1227749 Jan 21 14:42 gw-adaed.sea.hqx -rw-r--r-- 1 mfeldman users 11907 Jan 21 16:05 userman.mac The first file is the original NYU document for Ada/Ed; you don't need it to run this system, but it contains useful background information. The last file 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 gw-adaed.sea.hqx and adaprogs.sea.hqx are BinHex-ed self-extracting Stuffit archives. Once you've downloaded the files to your Mac, you need to use the BinHex utility program to un-encode them. BinHex is a free program that you can pick up from any Mac archive or user group. The folder named "GWU AdaEd Folder" contains a file icon "GWU Ada"with a version number. This is a double-clickable application. The other files are not. Do NOT move or otherwise disturb these files! GW-Ada/Ed expects to find those files, and behavior will be unpredictable if you mess with them. The folders GWUDemos, NYUDemos, and Spider contain sets of interesting programs to de,onstrate the capabilities of GW-Ada/Ed-Mac and of Ada in general. GWUDemos was produced by GWU, NYUDemos by NYU, and Spider by John Dalbey of California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo. Once all four folders are available on your Mac, start reading the user manual, which gives a brief tutorial on using the system. We would like to have some idea who is using our software, and therefore request that you make contact by e-mail to let us know how you like it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------