Re: Ada Streams usage (was Escape Sequences in Strings)

[Marin David Condic <mcondic.nospam@acm.org>]

Ted Dennison wrote:

> > I suppose I was thinking more along the lines of "difficult" real time
> > systems. :-)
> Well, I don't know if there is a good word for that, but there probably
> ought to be. A lot of embedded real-time work is done on older (slower)
> microprocessors due to the cost factor.
>

A few years back I did a rocket engine job that used a MilStd-1750a. It was
Rad-Hard, bog slow and we were restricted to 64kwords of memory. (Using the
extended address spaces would have only made it slower. We didn't have board
realestate anyway.) By the time we were done with the job, we were upwards
of 93% CPU utilization and we were all sweating bullets that something was
going to drive it over the edge. In that kind of environment, you REALLY get
sensitive to the cost of every little data motion or procedure call
overhead. You get REALLY tricky in what you can coax out of the compiler and
how you can speed up every little operation.

I think so long as we have computers, there will be jobs we want to do with
them that will drive them to their limits. Hence I think we'll always be
worried about the kind of code we get out of enbedded system compilers. Most
apps won't care about the overhead involved with streams - whats a few
hundred milliseconds for an app that wants to load/store its data using
streams or send a message down a TCP/IP pipe across the Internet? But that
isn't the whole universe of applications. :-)

MDC
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Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
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