A technique to build Ada preprocessors

Abstract

GNAT (GNU NYU Ada Translator) is a front-end and runtime system for Ada 95 distributed under the GNU Free Software Licence. In this paper we propose a technique to add a pre-processing phase to the GNAT front-end. This technique reduces time required to implement a high quality pre-processor and it facilitates the use of the GNAT front-end to experiment with Ada extensions. We briefly introduce the GNAT architecture and we describe our proposed technique.