free Ada/Ed compiler and environment for 386/486 users

GW-Ada/Ed Distribution September 1993


We are happy to announce that a new distribution of GW-Ada/Ed is now
available on WUARCHIVE. This software can be acquired by anonymous ftp
from wuarchive.wustl.edu, and is located in the directory
languages/ada/compiler/adaed/gwu/9309/dos.


Acknowledgement


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.


Contents


This distribution contains the executables for GWAda, which consists of
the NYU Ada/Ed translator/interpreter system for DOS, together with an
integrated editor developed by Prof. Arthur Vargas Lopes of the Pontifical
University at Porto Alegre, Brazil. Lopes began his work on GWAda while he
was a doctoral student at The George Washington University. There is also
a very nice extended runtime facility, with interesting kinds of source
tracing. The runtime was developed by Charles Kann, a doctoral student at
GW.


GWAda is being freely distributed at no charge. In the near future we will
make the source code available under the GNU General Public License.
Please understand that we are not yet providing source code because this
system is still in the developmental stage and we wish to avoid horrible
version-proliferation complications. Source code for Ada/Ed itself is
available from NYU and from WUARCHIVE.


You may in any case distribute this software as you see fit, for
educational purposes and not for profit. Include this document if you
redistribute the software, and give full credit to its originators.


GWAda is distributed as two .zip archives created by info-zip, which is
included in the distribution. Each archive will fit on a 1.44 mb
high-density 3.5" diskette.


When you un-archive the files (see the instructions below), you will find
a user manual, userman.doc, describing the GW development environment, and
a file readme.nyu file with documentation on the NYU part of the system.
Note that you do not have to use the GWAda integrated environment, but can
execute the various parts of NYU Ada/Ed from the DOS command line, as
described in the NYU instructions.


System Requirements


      IBM PC Compatible, 386 or 486, running MS-DOS or PC-DOS
      at least 3.6 mb available extended memory
      at least 5 mb free hard disk space


Additional Libraries


We are providing a few additional libraries for you to work with. One is a
set of interesting demos developed at GWU; another is John Dalbey's Spider
Graphics; still other is an adaptation of the Portable Ada Math Library.
These are set up in separate subdirectories. A fourth subdirectory
contains a lot of interesting Ada programs supplied by NYU as part of
their distribution.


Help with the Ada Language Reference Manual


Part of the GWAda environment is a help system that assists in searching
the Ada Language Reference Manual. This hypertext-like navigational aid is
accessed from the Help menu in GWAda.


Templates in the Editor


We are experimenting with "templates" in the editor. Try selecting options
from the "Ada" menu. Some of the templates are very straightforward
control structures; others are "higher-level" structures. You can change
the contents of the templates.


Package Completion


The package is a very important structure in Ada. To help you create
packages easily, we have included in the editor a facility that will
automatically create the skeleton of a package body once you have
constructed and compiled the specification. See the user manual for
further details.


Runtime Monitoring


This system incorporates some innovative facilities for letting you
observe the behavior of your program as it executes. When you start
executing a program, a window opens to show you its source code, and
scrolls the code, line-by-line, during execution. You can also "single-
step" through the code; pressing the space bar advances the execution one
more line. In addition, if your program calls a subprogram, a window opens
for the subprogram, overlapping the calling program's window. Finally,
you can control the execution speed of your program with a "speed
control."


If your program contains multiple Ada tasks, the runtime monitor will let
you follow the execution of the various tasks as they are "time- shared".
You can open up to four windows to show task source code. See the user
manual for further details.


This program is distributed free of charge for educational purposes, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY
or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.


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)
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