Re: Ada and Automotive Industry

[james@cdac.com (James Thiele)]

In article <Pine.GSO.3.95.961201100430.21598A-100000@nunic.nu.edu> Richard Riehle <rriehle@nunic.nu.edu> writes:
>On Wed, 27 Nov 1996, Ken Garlington wrote:
>
>[snip]
>> I get ESP as well, and I see several "C" compilers advertised for the 8051.
>> Doesn't this fly in the face of your earlier argument that most programmers
>> would rather use assembly? For that matter, if "C" is commercially feasible,
>> based on the number of ads, why not Ada (or at least an Ada subset)? There's
>> certainly published experience that Ada compilers can outperform "C" compilers.
>
>  Many 8051 programmers even refuse to use C because it is too inefficient
>  for their needs.  Certainly, one can ascribe some of that intransigence
>  to the elitism characteristic of those who program only in assembler.
>  But another aspect is the need for constraining applications to a
>  minimally configured 8051.
>

"minimally configured" is the key phrase here.  I was working on a project
a couple years ago where some thing had to be computed about 9500 times
per second.  It was prototyped on an 8051, then I converted it to a
custom 8-bit microcontroller.  In both cases we had about a ten percent
margin of time.  I also had two bytes of internal memory left.  Not
much chance of a C compiler doing the job.


--
James Thiele
james@cdac.com (work) or jet@eskimo.com (home)
http://www.eskimo.com/~jet