Re: [Fwd: F22 completes 11% of its Flight tests]

["Marin D. Condic" <mcondic-nospam@quadruscorp.com>]

jtarver wrote:
> I am refering to VAX Ada compilers with extended instruction sets.  Do you
> have a reading comprehension problem?
> 

Everyone here has been trying to politely address your concerns so it
would be nice if you were to reciprocate the courtesy.

We have already stated that the DEC Ada compiler for the VAX did not
implement any syntactic features outside of the language standard. The
compiler did provide some system dependent packages and pragmas as
permitted by the standard and the documentation did highlight any
"implementation defined" behaviors as required by the standard, but
there were *no* extensions to the syntax of the language.

We have asked what you mean by "extended instruction sets" because
clearly you are using the terminology in some way that is not the common
understanding. "VAX" itself means "Virtual Address eXtended" because the
VAX architecture was conceived as an "extention" to the "instruction
set" of the PDP11 computer. That clearly has nothing whatsoever to do
with Ada or portability. The instruction set for the VAX architecture
was never contracted for by the government to be some sort of "portable"
machine instruction set, nor did DEC ever mean for Data General to be
able to interpret VAX executable code on their machines or whatever
confusion may exist about this.

"Instruction Sets" in most common usage refer to machine language
instructions - the actual zeros and ones that the processor interprets.
Ada permits an implementation to define a mechanism for inserting
machine language instructions into an Ada program. This is necessary for
those of us who do embedded programming and need to actually get at the
hardware and manipulate it. It is, of necessity, machine specific, just
as similar machine code insertions in C or Fortran or whatever are going
to be. If this is what you are referring to, then of course it will be
non portable. Name me a language that permits machine code insertions
which is?

If by "extended instruction sets" you mean to imply that DEC Ada would
parse out tokens from an Ada program which were not defined in the LRM
and interpret those tokens in some DEC defined manner, then you need to
show us an example, because I know that I am unaware of any such
extensions to the language in that compiler and I have used it
extensively. DEC did not in any way extend the Ada language by, for
example, providing a "do...while" looping construct, or a "case"
statement with fallthrough semantics or any such thing.

Your claim that Ada (in particular DEC Ada) is not portable runs counter
to the experience of those of us who do it every day for a living. If
you believe this to be the case, you should post an example of what you
mean.

MDC
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