GNAT

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see Gnat (disambiguation).

GNAT
Ada source within GPS
Developed by	AdaCore and the GNU Project
Latest release	GNAT Pro 6.1.1 (2008-02-15) [1] GNAT GPL 2008 (2008-06-11) GNAT GAP 2008 (2008-06-05)
OS	GNU/Linux, Solaris/SPARC, Microsoft Windows, et al.
Genre	Compiler
License	GPL-compatible MGPL
Website	GNAT Pro GNAT GPL GNAT GAP

GNAT is a free-software compiler for the Ada programming language which forms part of the GNU Compiler Collection. It supports all versions of the language, i.e. Ada 2005, Ada 95 and Ada 83. Originally its name was an acronym that stood for GNU NYU Ada Translator, but that name no longer applies. The front-end and run-time are written in Ada.

JGNAT is a GNAT version that compiles from the Ada programming language to Java bytecode.

1 History
2 License
3 See also
4 Further reading
5 External links

[edit] History

The project started in 1992 when the United States Air Force awarded the New York University (NYU) a contract to build an open source compiler for Ada to help with the Ada 9X standardization process. The 3-million-dollar contract required the use of the GNU GPL for all developments, and assignment of copyright to the Free Software Foundation. The first official validation of GNAT happened in 1995.

In 1994 and 1996, the original authors of GNAT founded two sister companies, Ada Core Technologies in New York City and ACT-Europe in Paris, to provide continuing development and commercial support of GNAT. Both companies were integrated and renamed to AdaCore in 2004.

GNAT was initially released separately from the main GCC sources. On October 2, 2001 the GNAT sources were contributed to the GCC CVS repository. The last version to be released separately was GNAT 3.15p, based on GCC 2.8.1, on October 2, 2002. Starting with GCC 3.4, on major platforms the official GCC release is able to pass 100% of the ACATS Ada tests included in the GCC testsuite. In GCC 4.0, more exotic platforms are also able to pass 100% of ACATS.

[edit] License

The compiler is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. The run-time is licensed under either the GNU General Public License ("GNAT GPL Edition" from AdaCore), or the GNAT Modified General Public License (GCC, GNAT Pro). It is part of most major GNU/Linux or BSD distributions.

[edit] See also

Free software Portal

[edit] Further reading

Javier Miranda, Edmond Schonberg (June 2004). GNAT: The GNU Ada Compiler. Retrieved on 2008-06-06.
Edmond Schonberg, Bernard Banner (1994). "The GNAT project". Proceedings of the conference on TRI-Ada '94: 48–57, ACM. doi:10.1145/197694.197706. Retrieved on 2008-06-07.