A Sharp (.NET)

From ArticleWorld


Ada Sharp .NET (A# .NET) is a freely-distributed port of the Ada programming language for the .NET platform., developed by the Department of Computer Science. It is distributed under a GPL license.

Programming environment

Ada Sharp is based on the well-known GNAT compiler. In addition, it also uses MGNAT, that compiles Ada to MSIL code. Also available is MSIL2Ada, which generates a set of Ada specifications from a MSIL file. This is needed if the programmer wants to use other functions that the .NET functions included with the standard .NET MGNAT compiler.

The standard IDE for Ada Sharp is AdaGIDE. AdaGIDE is a full-featured Integrated Development Environment, with support for automatic code reformatting, syntax-highlighting, spell-checking, documentation and parenthesis matching. It also supports several debuggers. The IDE itself will probably be quite familiar to users of the old Borland IDE's for Pascal or C/C++.

.NET Support

A# provides full .NET support. Although MGNAT only supports a few libraries by default (namely scorlib.dll, System.dll, System.Windows.Forms.dll, and System.Drawing.dll), it is possible to use any .NET-compliant library through MSIL2Ada.

There are some efforts to integrate A# with Visual Studio .NET, but, at the time of writing, there is no support for this. However, many other .NET IDEs support A#, including the popular Unix-based MonoDevelop.