Ada and RISC OS

Introduction

If you ask a RISC OS software developer what language he uses for development, there are not many answers you can expect: "C" is the standard answer, sometimes "C++", for smaller things "BBC BASIC" and for the optimization freaks "pure ARM Assembler".

But - there is, for quite some time now, a very interesting alternative available: Ada 95, available via a port of the GNAT (GNU Ada Translator) compiler, which is part of the GCC (GNU compiler collection).

As a proof of suitability of Ada for software development on RISC OS, you might have a look at CDBurn - this CD writing package is developed and implemented completely in Ada 95. And people seem to like it ;-)

During the implementation of CDBurn, I developed a library which allows the writing of WIMP applications in Ada 95 without too much problems.

At the moment, we have started a quite large project to develop a real class library for RISC OS programming with Ada 95 to make the development of full-blown RISC OS applications both easier and more powerful. Anyone who wants to help with designing, programming, reviewing, documenting, translating etc., please contact me. A rough overview is available here.

Ada information

There are many interesting Ada resources available on the Internet. Here are some links:


 
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