Gnat

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GNAT is the GNU Ada Compiler based on GCC. Originally its name was an acronym that stood for GNU NYU Ada Translator, but nowadays it does not have any meaning. The front-end and runtime are written in Ada, and are licensed using the General Public License.

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The project started in 1992 when the US 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 contract required the use of the GNU GPL for all developments. In 1994 a company named Ada Core Technologies (renamed as AdaCore at the end of 2004) was founded to provide continuing development and commercial support of GNAT. The first official validation of GNAT happened in 1995.

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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. AdaCore recommends against using the versions of GNAT released with GCC 3.3 and below.

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