How to modify the GNAT frontend to experiment with Ada Extensions?

Abstract

This paper describes how we modified GNAT to experiment with one Ada extension. Our proposed extension, named Drago, is designed to support the implementation of fault-tolerant distributed applications. It is the result of an effort to impose discipline and give linguistic support to the main concepts of the Isis communication toolkit, as well as to experiment with the group communication paradigm. In this paper we briefly introduce Drago, and describe the modifications made to the GNAT scanner, parser, and semantic analyzer.