This paper explains our efforts to add Ada to Microsoft’s family of .NET languages. There are several advantages to weaving Ada into the Common Language Environment provided by the .NET environment. This paper explains our approach and current progress on the research. We provide the means to extract Ada specification files from Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL) code and compile Ada programs into MSIL.

Microsoft’s .NET environment provides a large set of object- oriented libraries for application development, targeted especially for web-based applications. [11,12] It is an entirely new framework for programming Windows (and possibly other) machines. One of the key goals of .NET was to provide language interoperability. Ada shares similar goals, and was the first language to include mixed-language pragmas as part of its specification. Our A# project seeks to create a fully-interoperable environment for an Ada programmer to use .NET. Ada programmers will be able to use libraries written by other .NET programmers even if the libraries are written in other languages. Ada programmers will also be able to share their libraries with programmers using other languages.

This paper presents research being done at the Air Force Academy on the A# project. We will discuss our approach for compiling Ada into MSIL, extracting Ada specifications from MSIL, and our progress to date.

MICROSOFT’SCOMMON LANGUAGE RUNTIME
In building the .NET Environment, Microsoft has found a way to provide language independent development coupled with platform independent execution. Their Common Language Environment (CLR) provides developers with a choice of several different programming languages such as C++, C#, Jscript, Visual Basic, and Perl. [10,11] The only requirement is that these languages must fit properly into the .NET environment. Each language must be compiled into the Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL) in order to run on separate platforms. The MSIL is then compiled using the Just-In-Time compiler specific to each runtime platform.

Download pdf Weaving Ada 95 into the .Net Environment