Re: ada and robots

[Jerry Petrey <gdp@mlb.cca.rockwell.com>]

Marin David Condic, 561.796.8997, M/S 731-93 wrote:
> 
> Joe Gwinn <gwinn@RES.RAY.COM> writes:
> >In practice, C was much more successful than Ada83 at riding metal.
> >Experience with Ada83 shows that it is very bad at direct control of
> >hardware, especially I/O hardware, and simply does not handle shared
> >memory correctly.  Ada95 is claimed to be better, but I don't have any
> >direct experience with it.  Actually, not many people do just yet.  I
> >suspect that most people are using C (perhaps called from Ada) for direct
> >control of I/O hardware and the like.
> >
>     Maybe with some of the early generation compilers, but we've been
>     "riding the metal" for years here in Ada and never had any trouble
>     getting direct control over the hardware. Oh sure, once in a while
>     you've got to dip into assembler to get at some real hardware
>     specific feature, but that's true of *any* language and at least
>     Ada specifies a way you can get at machine instructions without
>     leaving the compiler.
> 


I agree.  As I discussed in an "Embedded Systems Programming" article in
Sept 95, I did all the low level hardware checkout and built-in test
software for a gas turbine engine controller in Ada83 using the Rational
VADScross compiler and found it to be quite easy at getting to "the
metal".
I did a lot of bit banging from Ada and used some machine code
insertions
to interface with some ROM based diagnostic routines on the CPU board
to avoid having to re-invent them.  Ada turned out to be an excellent
choice for that project.

I am currently working on a home project of controlling a mobile robot
(with an embedded PC) using Ada.  I only wish Ada was available for some
of the smaller micros like the 68HC11 - for those I now prefer Forth.

-- 
=====================================================================
== Jerry Petrey                                                    ==
== Consultant Software Engineer - Member Team Ada and Team Forth   ==
==            Rockwell Collins Commercial Avionics Group           ==
==            Melbourne, FL   email: gdp@mlb.cca.rockwell.com      ==
=====================================================================