Increased Interest In Ada?

Increased Interest In Ada?

[Marin David Condic]

This is just a perceptual observation, but it seems that C.L.A. is
enjoying an increased participation level in recent months. Does anybody
else share this perception? Has anybody looked at the statistics to know
if there has been a significant increase any time recently?

If true, it would be a good sign.

MDC

--
======================================================================
Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ q u a d r u s c o r p . c o m
Visit my web site at:  http://www.mcondic.com/

    "I'd trade it all for just a little more"
        --  Charles Montgomery Burns, [4F10]
======================================================================

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Florian Weimer]

Marin David Condic <mcondic.auntie.spam@acm.org> writes:

> This is just a perceptual observation, but it seems that C.L.A. is
> enjoying an increased participation level in recent months. Does anybody
> else share this perception? Has anybody looked at the statistics to know
> if there has been a significant increase any time recently?

The UUNET numbers are remarkable:

November 2000:    877 postings
December 2000:   1007 postings
January  2001:   1317 postings

(My archive of de.admin.lists where these statistics are posted
doesn't go back further.)

> If true, it would be a good sign.

The January number is probably influenced by Latin and other
irrelevant topics. ;-)

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[BSCrawford]

In article <3A82EFA2.C8756B09@acm.org>, Marin David Condic writes:

>This is just a perceptual observation, but it seems that C.L.A. is
>enjoying an increased participation level in recent months.
...

I think we should begin speaking of "Ada, the Comeback Language."
(It worked for Bill Clinton in 1992 :-)

Bard S. Crawford, 
  Author of "Ada Essentials: Overview, Examples and Glossary," 
  a compact volume available in three forms: printed book, pdf 
  file, and a collection of browser-based web pages.  See
http://www.learnada.com  
-----------------------
Stage Harbor Software
9 Patriots Drive - Lexington, MA - 02420 USA
bard@learnada.com - 781-862-3613

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[JF Harrison]

I don't read CLA through Usenet, I get it as a mailing list and send to it
as a mailing list.
This makes it much easier to read and participate in CLA.

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Ken Garlington]

Wouldn't a more relevant statistic be the number of posters?

"Florian Weimer" <fw@deneb.enyo.de> wrote in message
news:87r918ap58.fsf@deneb.enyo.de...
: Marin David Condic <mcondic.auntie.spam@acm.org> writes:
:
: > This is just a perceptual observation, but it seems that C.L.A. is
: > enjoying an increased participation level in recent months. Does anybody
: > else share this perception? Has anybody looked at the statistics to know
: > if there has been a significant increase any time recently?
:
: The UUNET numbers are remarkable:
:
: November 2000:    877 postings
: December 2000:   1007 postings
: January  2001:   1317 postings
:
: (My archive of de.admin.lists where these statistics are posted
: doesn't go back further.)
:
: > If true, it would be a good sign.
:
: The January number is probably influenced by Latin and other
: irrelevant topics. ;-)

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Preben Randhol]

On Thu, 08 Feb 2001 14:12:34 -0500, Marin David Condic wrote:
>This is just a perceptual observation, but it seems that C.L.A. is
>enjoying an increased participation level in recent months. Does anybody
>else share this perception? Has anybody looked at the statistics to know
>if there has been a significant increase any time recently?
>
>If true, it would be a good sign.

Yes it would.

What would be very nice was if a lot of the students who take Ada 95
courses at the university could see that Ada 95 can also be used to
make cool programs using either GtkAda or SDL or other Toolkits. I
mean that one see that one can make nice GUIs with Ada too and not
only the hyped Java. So that when the students that also codes as a
hobby, goes home they will continue programming in Ada 95 and not
revert to C/C++ or Java. I think Linux and the desktop area of Linux
is a opportunity for Ada to make a "comeback".

-- 
Preben Randhol ---------------- http://www.pvv.org/~randhol/ --
iMy favorite editor is Emacs!<ESC>bcwVim<ESC>
                                         -- vim best-editor.txt

RE: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Robert C. Leif, Ph.D.]

From: Bob Leif
To: Brad Crawford
From a marketing perspective, we should treat Ada as a new product.
Therefore, we should reverse Ada's name. If we changed the name and started
issuing press releases, we could start a new software bandwagon. I know that
there would be something unusual about hyping a product that actually
worked.

-----Original Message-----
From: comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org
[mailto:comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org]On Behalf Of BSCrawford
Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2001 12:41 PM
To: comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org
Subject: Re: Increased Interest In Ada?


In article <3A82EFA2.C8756B09@acm.org>, Marin David Condic writes:

>This is just a perceptual observation, but it seems that C.L.A. is
>enjoying an increased participation level in recent months.
...

I think we should begin speaking of "Ada, the Comeback Language."
(It worked for Bill Clinton in 1992 :-)

Bard S. Crawford,
  Author of "Ada Essentials: Overview, Examples and Glossary,"
  a compact volume available in three forms: printed book, pdf
  file, and a collection of browser-based web pages.  See
http://www.learnada.com
-----------------------
Stage Harbor Software
9 Patriots Drive - Lexington, MA - 02420 USA
bard@learnada.com - 781-862-3613

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Marin David Condic]

Years ago, that was how I got C.L.A. when the only access the company allowed
was through mail. My recollection at the time was that the mail route missed
tons of posts. Last I heard, nobody was maintaining a mail server for C.L.A.

MDC

JF Harrison wrote:

> I don't read CLA through Usenet, I get it as a mailing list and send to it
> as a mailing list.
> This makes it much easier to read and participate in CLA.

--
======================================================================
Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ q u a d r u s c o r p . c o m
Visit my web site at:  http://www.mcondic.com/

    "I'd trade it all for just a little more"
        --  Charles Montgomery Burns, [4F10]
======================================================================

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Marin David Condic]

If the profs who teach Ada would refer their students here and to some of the
more useful web sites like Adapower, this would help because they would get
exposed to these sorts of uses of Ada. We can always do our part by politely
helping out the students when we can.

MDC

Preben Randhol wrote:

> What would be very nice was if a lot of the students who take Ada 95
> courses at the university could see that Ada 95 can also be used to
> make cool programs using either GtkAda or SDL or other Toolkits. I
> mean that one see that one can make nice GUIs with Ada too and not
> only the hyped Java. So that when the students that also codes as a
> hobby, goes home they will continue programming in Ada 95 and not
> revert to C/C++ or Java. I think Linux and the desktop area of Linux
> is a opportunity for Ada to make a "comeback".
>

--
======================================================================
Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ q u a d r u s c o r p . c o m
Visit my web site at:  http://www.mcondic.com/

    "I'd trade it all for just a little more"
        --  Charles Montgomery Burns, [4F10]
======================================================================

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Marin David Condic]

But then we'd have to start scolding people for writing ADA instead of adA,
wouldn't we? :-) :-)

MDC

Robert C. Leif, Ph.D. wrote:

> From: Bob Leif
> To: Brad Crawford
> From a marketing perspective, we should treat Ada as a new product.
> Therefore, we should reverse Ada's name. If we changed the name and started
> issuing press releases, we could start a new software bandwagon. I know that
> there would be something unusual about hyping a product that actually
> worked.
>

--
======================================================================
Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ q u a d r u s c o r p . c o m
Visit my web site at:  http://www.mcondic.com/

    "I'd trade it all for just a little more"
        --  Charles Montgomery Burns, [4F10]
======================================================================

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Ian Wild]

> Robert C. Leif, Ph.D. wrote:
> 
> > From a marketing perspective, we should treat Ada as a new product.
> > ...If we changed the name ...

Am I too late to do the "Ada'succ(s)" joke?

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Preben Randhol]

On Fri, 09 Feb 2001 08:36:29 -0500, Marin David Condic wrote:
>If the profs who teach Ada would refer their students here and to some of the
>more useful web sites like Adapower, this would help because they would get
>exposed to these sorts of uses of Ada. We can always do our part by politely
>helping out the students when we can.

Yes I agree. Also as long as it isn't a "Do my homework for me"-post :-)

-- 
Preben Randhol ------------------- http://www.pvv.org/~randhol/ --
                 �For me, Ada95 puts back the joy in programming.�

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[David Botton]

There is a maintained and working CLA to mail gateway that I have been using
for some time now at:

http://ada.eu.org/mailman/listinfo/comp.lang.ada

David Botton

----- Original Message -----
From: "Marin David Condic" <mcondic.auntie.spam@acm.org>


> Years ago, that was how I got C.L.A. when the only access the company
allowed
> was through mail. My recollection at the time was that the mail route
missed
> tons of posts. Last I heard, nobody was maintaining a mail server for
C.L.A.

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Florian Weimer]

Ian Wild <ian@cfmu.eurocontrol.be> writes:

> > > From a marketing perspective, we should treat Ada as a new product.
> > > ...If we changed the name ...
> 
> Am I too late to do the "Ada'succ(s)" joke?

Isn't that a bit too ambivalent?

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Ehud Lamm]

Marin David Condic <mcondic.auntie.spam@acm.org> wrote in message
news:3A83F25C.CEB50F1D@acm.org...
> If the profs who teach Ada would refer their students here and to some of
the
> more useful web sites like Adapower, this would help because they would
get
> exposed to these sorts of uses of Ada. We can always do our part by
politely
> helping out the students when we can.
>

I do this all the time. I send them to find reusable stuff on AdaPower (some
of it my contributios, which I for this very purpose post on AdaPower and
not on our local site). I also tell them about interesting comp.lang.ada
threads.

Those that have genuine interests in learning, try to use these resources.
Alas, they are always the minority.

Some recent threads here started by my students. One was the "Visual Ada"
thread. What's interesting is that the semester just ended, so the student
is asking about an Ada IDE after the course ended. Does this mean he likes
to use Ada for other things? I don't know.

Ehud Lamm

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Jeffrey D. Cherry]

Marin David Condic wrote:
> 
> If the profs who teach Ada would refer their students here and to some of the
> more useful web sites like Adapower, this would help because they would get
> exposed to these sorts of uses of Ada. We can always do our part by politely
> helping out the students when we can.

As a part-time instructor, I teach Ada (and other languages) at the local 
community college for both CS1 and CS2 courses.  My syllabus for each of 
the Ada courses strongly recommends that students check out Ada resources 
on the Internet, starting with AdaPower and CLA.  The one thing I restrict 
students from doing is asking for help on their homework in CLA.  That's 
my job.  The other computer science instructor has a similar policy and
even assigns homework requiring students to summarize a recent Internet 
article, discussion thread, etc. 

Although students loathe to do any more reading than the minimum, 
occasionally, there is the motivated student that asks a question about 
some discussion on CLA.  I've also found certain CLA discussions to
be quite interesting and posed the original query to my class in order
to generate a discussion of "real-world" problems.  I have demonstrated
GtkAda applications to show students that GUI applications can be built 
with Ada.  I have also shown how a Java application can be built using 
Ada rather than Java (using JGNAT of course).  Although my Ada students
were happy to hear that they don't have to learn Java to create Java
apps, my Java students were rather disappointed.

I suspect that other instructors, throughout the world, have similar
practices that encourage students to explore the resources of the 
Internet and participate in discussion groups.  If you fail to notice
a large contingent of student participation on CLA, it's not 
necessarily due to the lack of encouragement by their instructors.

Personally, I believe that it is more important to teach students good
software engineering principles and practices than to sing the praises 
of any one particular programming language.  I try to instill in my
students that a programming language is merely a tool used to express 
their design in a form that a stupid machine can understand.  At the
end of each of my CS1 courses, I always devote a lecture hour to 
persuading students to learn another programming language, and then 
another, and another, ....  I do this because a good engineer will 
learn about all the available tools and then apply proper engineering
criteria to select the right tool for the job at hand.  Ada, by 
design, is one of the best tools for expressing a software design 
in the vast majority of real-world applications.

Perhaps the increased interest in Ada is due to all the diligent teachers 
who have taught their students well.  Perhaps those students have now 
graduated and are choosing Ada after performing a tradeoff analysis 
with other programming languages.  Perhaps these well educated graduates
are dismissing the marketing group's recommendation for a programming
language because it's based on personal bias, advertising hype, perceived 
popularity, or the misperception that a certain programming language will
somehow guarantee an increased market share.  Perhaps these graduates are
negating management pressure to use one language by showing that it is
more cost effective to select a programming language based on technical 
merits of the language in light of the specific problem and accounting for 
all phases of the resulting product's useful life.  

I may be taking this a little too personally since I'm an instructor.  I
may be a little too sensitive to comments about instructors not doing 
enough with regard to teaching a programming language.  If so, then I 
apologize for my little tirade and I appreciate your tolerance of my
rankings.  In any case, thanks for allowing me to vent; I feel better.

-- 
Regards,
Jeffrey D. Cherry
Senior IV&V Analyst
Logicon Operations and Services
Logicon Inc.
a Northrop Grumman company

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Stephen Leake]

"Jeffrey D. Cherry" <jdcherry@utech.net> writes:

> As a part-time instructor, I teach Ada (and other languages) at the local 
> community college for both CS1 and CS2 courses.  My syllabus for each of 
> the Ada courses strongly recommends that students check out Ada resources 
> on the Internet, starting with AdaPower and CLA.  The one thing I restrict 
> students from doing is asking for help on their homework in CLA.  That's 
> my job.  The other computer science instructor has a similar policy and
> even assigns homework requiring students to summarize a recent Internet 
> article, discussion thread, etc. 
> 
> <snip lots of good stuff>

As an Ada enthusiast, but more importantly as a software engineer who
would like to work with well trained software engineers, I thank you
for your efforts. 

Keep up the good work; the world will be a better place for it! 

> -- 
> Regards,
> Jeffrey D. Cherry
> Senior IV&V Analyst
> Logicon Operations and Services
> Logicon Inc.
> a Northrop Grumman company

-- 
-- Stephen Leake, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Jerry Petrey]

Stephen Leake wrote:
> 
> "Jeffrey D. Cherry" <jdcherry@utech.net> writes:
> 
> > As a part-time instructor, I teach Ada (and other languages) at the local
> > community college for both CS1 and CS2 courses.  My syllabus for each of
> > the Ada courses strongly recommends that students check out Ada resources
> > on the Internet, starting with AdaPower and CLA.  The one thing I restrict
> > students from doing is asking for help on their homework in CLA.  That's
> > my job.  The other computer science instructor has a similar policy and
> > even assigns homework requiring students to summarize a recent Internet
> > article, discussion thread, etc.
> >
> > <snip lots of good stuff>
> 
> As an Ada enthusiast, but more importantly as a software engineer who
> would like to work with well trained software engineers, I thank you
> for your efforts.
> 
> Keep up the good work; the world will be a better place for it!
> 
> > --
> > Regards,
> > Jeffrey D. Cherry
> > Senior IV&V Analyst
> > Logicon Operations and Services
> > Logicon Inc.
> > a Northrop Grumman company
> 
> --
> -- Stephen Leake, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.


I second that.  Jeffrey, your work is definitely appreciated.  I hope
some
of your former students end up here.  We are always looking for good
software engineers and I especially like those with an Ada background. 
More
and more of our programs are being pushed towards C++ because so many
managers think Ada is dead and are too ignorant to see the benefits.  I
think
it is people like you who can make a difference.

Best wishes,

Jerry
-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Jerry Petrey                                                
-- Senior Principal Systems Engineer - Navigation, Guidance, & Control
-- Raytheon Missile Systems          - Member Team Ada & Team Forth
-- NOTE: please remove <NOSPAM> in email address to
reply                  
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Frank]

Hi!

Are there Ada courses on NTNU?

Frank

Preben Randhol <randhol+abuse@pvv.org> wrote in message
news:slrn987ego.mc.randhol+abuse@kiuk0156.chembio.ntnu.no...
> On Thu, 08 Feb 2001 14:12:34 -0500, Marin David Condic wrote:
> >This is just a perceptual observation, but it seems that C.L.A. is
> >enjoying an increased participation level in recent months. Does anybody
> >else share this perception? Has anybody looked at the statistics to know
> >if there has been a significant increase any time recently?
> >
> >If true, it would be a good sign.
>
> Yes it would.
>
> What would be very nice was if a lot of the students who take Ada 95
> courses at the university could see that Ada 95 can also be used to
> make cool programs using either GtkAda or SDL or other Toolkits. I
> mean that one see that one can make nice GUIs with Ada too and not
> only the hyped Java. So that when the students that also codes as a
> hobby, goes home they will continue programming in Ada 95 and not
> revert to C/C++ or Java. I think Linux and the desktop area of Linux
> is a opportunity for Ada to make a "comeback".
>
> --
> Preben Randhol ---------------- http://www.pvv.org/~randhol/ --
> iMy favorite editor is Emacs!<ESC>bcwVim<ESC>
>                                          -- vim best-editor.txt
>

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Preben Randhol]

On Tue, 20 Feb 2001 21:27:16 +0100, Frank wrote:
>Hi!
>
>Are there Ada courses on NTNU?

Not that I know of. The Computer Science dep uses Java and C++ I think,
but perhaps the Electronics department use some Ada. Sadly the
introductory computer courses are now in Fortran and Java. :-(

-- 
Preben Randhol ------------------- http://www.pvv.org/~randhol/ --
                 �For me, Ada95 puts back the joy in programming.�

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Marin David Condic]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1575 bytes --]

I could imagine Ada being popular in electrical engineering departments if
there were a convenient and inexpensive (maybe free?) Ada environment for
playing around with embedded computing. It would have to work "off the
shelf" with readily available hardware so that some prof could build a
class/lab around it & students could afford to play with it on their own. I
am thinking of Dr. McCormick's model railroad class or the Lego robot
discussed here a while ago. If either of these was packaged as "An embedded
programming course in a bag" so that a prof could just pick it up and start
teaching it, this might go a long way toward encouraging Ada as an
educational tool as well as a practical tool for building real-world
systems.

(Does anyone smell commercial possibilities here? :-)

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/



"Preben Randhol" <randhol+abuse@pvv.org> wrote in message
news:slrn997li7.193.randhol+abuse@kiuk0156.chembio.ntnu.no...
> On Tue, 20 Feb 2001 21:27:16 +0100, Frank wrote:
> >Hi!
> >
> >Are there Ada courses on NTNU?
>
> Not that I know of. The Computer Science dep uses Java and C++ I think,
> but perhaps the Electronics department use some Ada. Sadly the
> introductory computer courses are now in Fortran and Java. :-(
>
> --
> Preben Randhol ------------------- http://www.pvv.org/~randhol/ --
>                  �For me, Ada95 puts back the joy in programming.�

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Marin David Condic]

It occurrs to me that much of the embedded programming experience could be
simulated in software. Obviously, you wouldn't get the "Real World"
experience of dealing with actual physical entities, but, for example,
actuators could be displayed on a screen and made to move much as they would
in the physical world. The software interface to such simulated sensors and
actuators wouldn't be quite the same thing as having to deal with actual
ports, memory addresses, etc., but it might be made close enough to be a
useful experience. Providing such a simulation in Ada would certainly be a
lot easier to achieve than finding an appropriate embedded target & compiler
port.

Question: Given that a simulation like this would lack certain important
aspects of the embedded, realtime programming experience (having to somehow
work with a cross-compilation environment, dealing with linkage issues,
memory mapping, physical reality, etc.) might it still be useful as a
teaching tool? I think a simulation in conjunction with hardware would be
useful, but I'm wondering about finding a way around the problem of compiler
and hardware availability?

MDC

"Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com> wrote in
message news:970ma1$1l7$1@nh.pace.co.uk...
> I could imagine Ada being popular in electrical engineering departments if
> there were a convenient and inexpensive (maybe free?) Ada environment for
> playing around with embedded computing. It would have to work "off the
> shelf" with readily available hardware so that some prof could build a
> class/lab around it & students could afford to play with it on their own.
I
> am thinking of Dr. McCormick's model railroad class or the Lego robot
> discussed here a while ago. If either of these was packaged as "An
embedded
> programming course in a bag" so that a prof could just pick it up and
start
> teaching it, this might go a long way toward encouraging Ada as an
> educational tool as well as a practical tool for building real-world
> systems.
>
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Jerry Petrey]

Marin David Condic wrote:
> 
> It occurrs to me that much of the embedded programming experience could be
> simulated in software. Obviously, you wouldn't get the "Real World"
> experience of dealing with actual physical entities, but, for example,
> actuators could be displayed on a screen and made to move much as they would
> in the physical world. The software interface to such simulated sensors and
> actuators wouldn't be quite the same thing as having to deal with actual
> ports, memory addresses, etc., but it might be made close enough to be a
> useful experience. Providing such a simulation in Ada would certainly be a
> lot easier to achieve than finding an appropriate embedded target & compiler
> port.
> 
> Question: Given that a simulation like this would lack certain important
> aspects of the embedded, realtime programming experience (having to somehow
> work with a cross-compilation environment, dealing with linkage issues,
> memory mapping, physical reality, etc.) might it still be useful as a
> teaching tool? I think a simulation in conjunction with hardware would be
> useful, but I'm wondering about finding a way around the problem of compiler
> and hardware availability?
> 
> MDC
> 
> "Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com> wrote in
> message news:970ma1$1l7$1@nh.pace.co.uk...
> > I could imagine Ada being popular in electrical engineering departments if
> > there were a convenient and inexpensive (maybe free?) Ada environment for
> > playing around with embedded computing. It would have to work "off the
> > shelf" with readily available hardware so that some prof could build a
> > class/lab around it & students could afford to play with it on their own.
> I
> > am thinking of Dr. McCormick's model railroad class or the Lego robot
> > discussed here a while ago. If either of these was packaged as "An
> embedded
> > programming course in a bag" so that a prof could just pick it up and
> start
> > teaching it, this might go a long way toward encouraging Ada as an
> > educational tool as well as a practical tool for building real-world
> > systems.
> >
> --
> Marin David Condic
> Senior Software Engineer
> Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
> Enabling the digital revolution
> e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
> Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


Marin, from my experience, I have found that such an approach can be 
very useful.  Years ago, I used to teach a course in embedded
programming
using Forth.  My class project was modeled after one from Forth, Inc. 
(who I had worked for in the past).  They used a small traffic light
with
road sensors and such so that you could move a toy car over them and 
activate the sensors.  The students would then write the Forth code to
implement the assigned behavior.  In my class, I needed to travel to
the location and I didn't want to take this kind of hardware with me so
I build a PC simulator for the traffic light and sensors and then each
student would run this on his PC and write the code to control it much
like he would with the real hardware.  When he would touch the road on 
the PC screen with the mouse it would register as a car passing and his 
code would then set the light sequence according to the required
behavior 
(and display them on the screen).  It seemed to be quite effective.  
Each student had his own little self contained environment in his PC to
play 
around in and experiment with different algorithms without the need to
connect to
any special hardware.  Of course, at some point they need to get the
real hardware
experience but this is a good way to start.

Jerry 
-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Jerry Petrey                                                
-- Senior Principal Systems Engineer - Navigation, Guidance, & Control
-- Raytheon Missile Systems          - Member Team Ada & Team Forth
-- NOTE: please remove <NOSPAM> in email address to
reply                  
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Peter Amey]

Marin David Condic wrote:
> 
> It occurrs to me that much of the embedded programming experience could be
> simulated in software. Obviously, you wouldn't get the "Real World"
> experience of dealing with actual physical entities, but, for example,
> actuators could be displayed on a screen and made to move much as they would
> in the physical world. The software interface to such simulated sensors and
> actuators wouldn't be quite the same thing as having to deal with actual
> ports, memory addresses, etc., but it might be made close enough to be a
> useful experience. Providing such a simulation in Ada would certainly be a
> lot easier to achieve than finding an appropriate embedded target & compiler
> port.
> 
> Question: Given that a simulation like this would lack certain important
> aspects of the embedded, realtime programming experience (having to somehow
> work with a cross-compilation environment, dealing with linkage issues,
> memory mapping, physical reality, etc.) might it still be useful as a
> teaching tool? I think a simulation in conjunction with hardware would be
> useful, but I'm wondering about finding a way around the problem of compiler
> and hardware availability?
> 

We have done something like this for the SPARK course.  We have a visual
basic :-( on-screen emulation of a hardware device and students can
drive it from their SPARK code using interface packages we provide.  The
link between SPARK and VB is done with David Botton's excellent COM
stuff.


Peter

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Tarjei T. Jensen]

Marin David Condic wrote in message <970ma1$1l7$1@nh.pace.co.uk>...
>I could imagine Ada being popular in electrical engineering departments if
>there were a convenient and inexpensive (maybe free?) Ada environment for
>playing around with embedded computing. It would have to work "off the
>shelf" with readily available hardware so that some prof could build a
>class/lab around it & students could afford to play with it on their own. I
>am thinking of Dr. McCormick's model railroad class or the Lego robot
>discussed here a while ago. If either of these was packaged as "An embedded
>programming course in a bag" so that a prof could just pick it up and start
>teaching it, this might go a long way toward encouraging Ada as an
>educational tool as well as a practical tool for building real-world
>systems.
>
>(Does anyone smell commercial possibilities here? :-)

It is clearly commercial possibilities if you can find a decent and cheap
PC/104 card or a PC motherboard/bios to work with. Then it should be a matter
of documenting how to use gnat and/or RTEMS to get results. You may have to
write a few drivers for the network card or graphics card.

You would have a great teaching tool and a easy kit to commercialize.


Greetings,

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Marin David Condic]

That sounds interesting. I'm wondering what sort of students you present
this to and what are the learning objectives? Do you think they learn much
about the embedded aspects, or do they learn more about realtime
programming?

My concern is that such a simulation would be useful for developing the high
level algorithms for embedded, realtime controls, but probably won't do a
good job of teaching the low level aspects of embedded programming. At the
high level, embedded programming looks much like any other kind of
programming - albeit, within a specialized problem domain. What I'd like to
find is a good, inexpensive way of teaching the low level aspects - things
like accessing different kinds of memory, interfacing to I/O devices,
utilizing hardware interrupts, etc. as well as the higher level concepts of
device control. You just don't get much of a feel for real embedded
programming unless you've had to spend time fighting with a linker to get
things located at specific places, or struggling to get bootstrap code to
load your software across a comm link, or get into the "Broken
Software/Broken Hardware" debate.

I think it would be helpful to Ada to have a good embedded/realtime
off-the-shelf course (book, software, hardware...) available, but I've just
not encountered the components that would make this possible at a practical
cost. Software simulation might make an interesting project, but I'm not
sure that it would illustrate enough of the important parts of the embedded
world.

Now possibly, if one were to bundle a compiler with a simulation of an
actual SBC with a popular processor, then you might have something there.
However, that starts becoming more work than simply designing a board and
retargeting a compiler... :-)

MDC



--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Peter Amey" <pna@praxis-cs.co.uk> wrote in message
news:3A94ED5E.4FF1E8EB@praxis-cs.co.uk...
> We have done something like this for the SPARK course.  We have a visual
> basic :-( on-screen emulation of a hardware device and students can
> drive it from their SPARK code using interface packages we provide.  The
> link between SPARK and VB is done with David Botton's excellent COM
> stuff.
>
>
> Peter

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Cesar Rabak]

Marin David Condic wrote:
> 
> It occurrs to me that much of the embedded programming experience could be
> simulated in software. Obviously, you wouldn't get the "Real World"
> experience of dealing with actual physical entities, but, for example,
> actuators could be displayed on a screen and made to move much as they would
> in the physical world. The software interface to such simulated sensors and
> actuators wouldn't be quite the same thing as having to deal with actual
> ports, memory addresses, etc., but it might be made close enough to be a
> useful experience. Providing such a simulation in Ada would certainly be a
> lot easier to achieve than finding an appropriate embedded target & compiler
> port.

I disagree, but see below.

> 
> Question: Given that a simulation like this would lack certain important
> aspects of the embedded, realtime programming experience (having to somehow
> work with a cross-compilation environment, dealing with linkage issues,
> memory mapping, physical reality, etc.) might it still be useful as a
> teaching tool? I think a simulation in conjunction with hardware would be
> useful, but I'm wondering about finding a way around the problem of compiler
> and hardware availability?

As you yourself pointed out, one such a system would rapidly fall from a
useful system to teach embedded systems programming to a simulator of
some sort, and then Ada being a relatively low level language for that
would loose its appeal to others like Matlab (which has a nice package
for simulating a lot of industrial processes) or some scripting language
already 'readied' with the right high level commands (macros?).

> 
> MDC
> 
> "Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com> wrote in
> message news:970ma1$1l7$1@nh.pace.co.uk...
> > I could imagine Ada being popular in electrical engineering departments if
> > there were a convenient and inexpensive (maybe free?) Ada environment for
> > playing around with embedded computing. It would have to work "off the
> > shelf" with readily available hardware so that some prof could build a
> > class/lab around it & students could afford to play with it on their own.

I don't know how is the situation in other parts of the world for this
kind of products, but in this country (Brazil), usually the kits for
this type of training are based in 8 bit microcontrollers. This IMHO
will lead to the need of some kind of subset of Ada language, which
ultimately may be counterproductive to original objective (spreading Ada
IIRC).


> I
> > am thinking of Dr. McCormick's model railroad class or the Lego robot
> > discussed here a while ago. If either of these was packaged as "An
> embedded
> > programming course in a bag" so that a prof could just pick it up and
> start
> > teaching it, this might go a long way toward encouraging Ada as an
> > educational tool as well as a practical tool for building real-world
> > systems.
> >

Just my 0.019999...

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Marin David Condic]

"Cesar Rabak" <csrabak@uol.com.br> wrote in message
news:3A95EDF6.8A132FE3@uol.com.br...
> Marin David Condic wrote:
> > useful experience. Providing such a simulation in Ada would certainly be
a
> > lot easier to achieve than finding an appropriate embedded target &
compiler
> > port.
>
> I disagree, but see below.
>
You disagree? Does this mean you know of a good Ada compiler targeted to an
inexpensive SBC that would fit the description? Or are you saying that
porting an Ada compiler to some SBC would be no big deal? In either case,
I'd definitely like to challenge you to verify this through demonstration.
:-)

> I don't know how is the situation in other parts of the world for this
> kind of products, but in this country (Brazil), usually the kits for
> this type of training are based in 8 bit microcontrollers. This IMHO
> will lead to the need of some kind of subset of Ada language, which
> ultimately may be counterproductive to original objective (spreading Ada
> IIRC).
>
Well the world has become a lot bigger than 8 bit microcontrollers. I am
currently working with a box that has a MIPS processor and almost the whole
system on a single chip. So a 32-bit processor able to control some
physical/electrical devices from a single board at an inexpensive price is
not at all out of the question. The problem is: Which One? If you are
familiar with embedded systems, I'm sure you know that there just aren't
thousands of Ada ports out there for popular boards/development kits. You
need the compiler, plus a good, powerful linker & cross-target debugger
along with probably some available libraries, bootstrap code, descent
documentation of everything, etc. Saying "Well GNAT has a port to chip X
available somewhere on the net..." is interesting, but if you don't have all
the pieces pulled together into a nicely integrated package that works
reliably, it wouldn't make a good student environment. (It's hard enough for
the pros to figure out how to get this sort of thing to work - how much
harder would it be for the neophytes? :-)

I'm always interested in hearing ideas on this topic if you have any.
Thanks.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Marin David Condic]

I'm taking a look at the PC/104 card info from: http://www.pc104.org/ It
looks interesting, but as far as I can tell, you'd probably have some
retargeting issues for GNAT no matter what you did. And of course, embedded
programming is more than finding GNAT and RTEMS for some target hardware -
you really need a lot of additional software for it to be useful. From the
hardware side, you'd need to have some basic electrical things like A/Ds,
D/As, (F/Ds, maybe?) discretes & ports that would be useful for student
projects and representative of real-world development.

I'm going to examine the PC/104 thing a bit more thoroughly. If you think of
any other possibilities for an SBC to which GNAT might target with minimal
fuss, let me know... Thanks.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/



"Tarjei T. Jensen" <tarjei.jensen@kvaerner.com> wrote in message
news:972uon$729@news.kvaerner.com...
> It is clearly commercial possibilities if you can find a decent and cheap
> PC/104 card or a PC motherboard/bios to work with. Then it should be a
matter
> of documenting how to use gnat and/or RTEMS to get results. You may have
to
> write a few drivers for the network card or graphics card.
>
> You would have a great teaching tool and a easy kit to commercialize.

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Tarjei T. Jensen]

Marin David Condic wrote
>I'm going to examine the PC/104 thing a bit more thoroughly. If you think of
>any other possibilities for an SBC to which GNAT might target with minimal
>fuss, let me know... Thanks.

Check with oarcorp. They have something about a GNAT/RTEMS combo on their front
page. That might be worthwhile to examine.

I suspect that anything quick and easy for a student/hobbyist to do is hard to
find information on. It seems to be the Ada way. I think the PR value of such a
"kit" would be incalcuable because everybody could see that Ada is easy. It
would be ridiculously easy to check it out for yourself.

Greetings,

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[James Rogers]

Another possibility, although not exactly free, is the PC/104 solution
provided by Aonix and PharLap.

PharLap offers a very nice PC/104 RTOS implementing a subset of the
Win32 API. Aonix bundles this solution with an Ada compiler that runs
on a PC. The Aonix Ada compiler can target either the PC or the
PC/104 board, allowing simple unit testing of many packages on the
PC, and the remaining testing on the PC/104 board.

The PharLap operating system comes with a useful collection of
capabilities including LAN networking (ftp, telnet, http, TCP/IP,
etc.)

There could be additional packages created for this solution to 
address devices not on the PC/104 hardware stack, such as RS232
ports, etc.

On my previous job I successfully used this system to develop
robotic control systems interfacing both with user interface 
devices and vehicle control interfaces. Robotic devices were all
manufactured by our company and controlled through a Controller
Area Network (CAN) interface. We also manufactured our own 
PC/104 CAN card which plugs into the PC/104 hardware stack.

Information about those products can be viewed at
http://www.omnitech.com

Jim Rogers
Colorado Springs, Colorado USA

Marin David Condic wrote:
> 
> I'm going to examine the PC/104 thing a bit more thoroughly. If you think of
> any other possibilities for an SBC to which GNAT might target with minimal
> fuss, let me know... Thanks.
>

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Marin David Condic]

I have some small familiarity with GNAT/RTEMS - which is to say I basically
know what it does, but with no knowledge of how it actually does it.
Basically, this wouldn't be a bad way to go.; Let's say, for the sake of
argument, that one had a version of GNAT that ran on a PC and was targeted
to a bare board MC68040 processor. One would need to compile RTEMS to this
processor to have the runtime services needed by Ada for tasking, etc. From
there, you would compile your application using GNAT and link it with RTEMS
& then have an image that would be executable on this bare board MC68040.
(Someone correct me if I'm fundamentally wrong - details at this point don't
concern me...)

Key to this would be that you'd need a fairly sophisticated linkage editor
that ran on the PC and targeted the 68040. You'd need to be able to locate
chunks of code/data in specific memory locations because presumably you'd
have things like EEPROM and DMA devices, etc.You'd have to get out of it
some kind of load image in a usable format (ELF or S-Records or whatever).

From there you need some means of getting the load image into the bare board
machine. That means having a PROM burner or some kind of bootstrap code
loaded on the machine to pull data off of some port and start loading it at
addresses required. The bootstrap needs some kind of software at the other
end of the port to read the loadable image and feed it the bits & bytes in
some protocol it understands.

Now the important thing to note here is that this is the *BARE MINIMUM* one
needs *JUST TO GET STARTED PROGRAMMING*. (sorry for shouting!) You'd still
want things like a source level debugger, some kind of on-board monitor to
wrap with your application, probably some software packages that could be
used to shield you from device specifics (although that would obviously be
one of the student exercises, you'd want them to be able to work with them
only as required by the course & just have some stuff available for the
other devices.) We could obviously go on with wanting things - like a
JTAG/EJTAG interface with software at the PC end, etc. I can easily imagine
*wanting* a lot! :-)

While we're at it, we'd need real good documentation for the SBC and its
hardware devices because you couldn't expect students to just simply *know*
how to write code for Brand X A/D Converter and it would be a lot to ask
them to go start pestering vendors for data books. (Hell! It's a whole lot
to ask of us professionals - but at least we can justify it along the lines
of "If the company is too *stupid* to go get me the manuals I need, I'll
burn up their money surfing the net or calling the companies until I get
it.) Documentation would have to extend to the overall system as well.
Someone has to answer the question "How do I go from some source file with
the embedded "Hello World" program in it to code actually cycling in the
box?"

From there, we'd need to either find or write some kind of college level
text that addressed embedded programming from the level of all the things
that will go on in our little SBC. I have only run into one text that
addresses this at all ("Programming Embedded Systems In C And C++" by
Michael Barr) and it only addresses some of the things you'd likely see in
an embedded computer - and as is obvious, not from the Ada perspective. (If
you know of others, I'd be glad to hear about them. I'd like to see
something that dealt with things like A/Ds and the devices that live at the
other end of them.)

Now the problem as I see it is this: Nobody has all these pieces pulled
together all in one place using Ada (at a low price, at least), but it
*DOES* exist (mostly) for C and maybe C++. You can go to any number of
vendors who will sell you an SBC development kit that will plug into your PC
with all the appropriate software at the PC end, etc. You can be up and
programming the card with C in short order and maybe the only thing you're
really missing is the college level text. Pulling together all this stuff in
Ada is certainly feasable, but it would be a non-trivial amount of work.

Since great minds think alike, I'll agree with you that the PR value for Ada
would be high because it would demonstrate how easy Ada is relative to C in
this arena. I'd go one step further in saying that *IF* the kit were to
exist, a *LOT* of EE profs would be tempted to structure a course around it
because it would eliminate a ton of work for them - hence even more PR
value. Throw on top of it that every EE student who's first embedded
experience is Ada would likely go on to industry with a favorable impression
of Ada and start pushing for its adoption. And of course, if the card itself
were fairly generally useful, you've got a commercial market for it as well.

My only problem with this idea is that my full-time occupation is not the
development of such kits and as a speculative, part-time venture I just
don't think I've got the time to do it. (Not in any reasonable timeframe!)
Maybe a vendor or professor or idle-rich-kid (or several of them) might get
interested and start pulling the pieces together.

MDC

--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Tarjei T. Jensen" <tarjei.jensen@kvaerner.com> wrote in message
news:97668g$718@news.kvaerner.com...
>
> Marin David Condic wrote
> >I'm going to examine the PC/104 thing a bit more thoroughly. If you think
of
> >any other possibilities for an SBC to which GNAT might target with
minimal
> >fuss, let me know... Thanks.
>
> Check with oarcorp. They have something about a GNAT/RTEMS combo on their
front
> page. That might be worthwhile to examine.
>
> I suspect that anything quick and easy for a student/hobbyist to do is
hard to
> find information on. It seems to be the Ada way. I think the PR value of
such a
> "kit" would be incalcuable because everybody could see that Ada is easy.
It
> would be ridiculously easy to check it out for yourself.
>
> Greetings,
>
>
>
>

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Marin David Condic]

Now that might just be the basis of an embedded programming course. As I
said elsewhere, I think it is a bit like cheating to have some version of an
RTOS like Windows or Unix on the card - but realistically speaking, that is
what a lot of students will see when they get out of school. (I'd like to
see them understand what the LynxOS or VxWorks guys have to do to get
*their* code to run!) I suppose if you add some specialized device cards to
the stack, then you're providing them with the opportunity to gain the
low-level access experience on at least some fronts.

I'll check out the site & take a look at Aonix again to see how much of the
solution may already be there. (And at what price!!! $$$$) Maybe a solution
is within grasp?

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/

"James Rogers" <jimmaureenrogers@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
news:3A96BF36.5E9B327@worldnet.att.net...
> Another possibility, although not exactly free, is the PC/104 solution
> provided by Aonix and PharLap.
>
> PharLap offers a very nice PC/104 RTOS implementing a subset of the
> Win32 API. Aonix bundles this solution with an Ada compiler that runs
> on a PC. The Aonix Ada compiler can target either the PC or the
> PC/104 board, allowing simple unit testing of many packages on the
> PC, and the remaining testing on the PC/104 board.
>
> The PharLap operating system comes with a useful collection of
> capabilities including LAN networking (ftp, telnet, http, TCP/IP,
> etc.)
>
> There could be additional packages created for this solution to
> address devices not on the PC/104 hardware stack, such as RS232
> ports, etc.
>
> On my previous job I successfully used this system to develop
> robotic control systems interfacing both with user interface
> devices and vehicle control interfaces. Robotic devices were all
> manufactured by our company and controlled through a Controller
> Area Network (CAN) interface. We also manufactured our own
> PC/104 CAN card which plugs into the PC/104 hardware stack.
>
> Information about those products can be viewed at
> http://www.omnitech.com
>
> Jim Rogers
> Colorado Springs, Colorado USA
>
> Marin David Condic wrote:
> >
> > I'm going to examine the PC/104 thing a bit more thoroughly. If you
think of
> > any other possibilities for an SBC to which GNAT might target with
minimal
> > fuss, let me know... Thanks.
> >

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Randy Brukardt]

James Rogers wrote in message <3A96BF36.5E9B327@worldnet.att.net>...
>Another possibility, although not exactly free, is the PC/104 solution
>provided by Aonix and PharLap.
>
>PharLap offers a very nice PC/104 RTOS implementing a subset of the
>Win32 API.

You can use the PharLap kit with the Windows version of Janus/Ada, as
well. While we don't actually sell a bundled version, we will provide
support for the combination.

            Randy Brukardt
            R.R. Software, Inc.

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Hans-Olof Danielsson]

Another option is the Lego Mindstorm robotics kit.

The robotics contains a Hitachi H8 microcontroller which is supported by the
latest GCC version. Recently there was a posting on the *crossgcc* list
regarding building a C cross compiler for H8 with GNU/Linux as host , so
there is at least a GCC-based C cross compilor.

When GNAT moves to GCC common source tree ( according to earlier posting on
this cla-list, that is planed for GCC 3.1 ) it shouldn�t be to difficult to
build a GNAT cross compiler for H8. It might be equaly easy ( or difficult )
with GCC 2.81 ( if it supports H8 ) used for GNAT 3.13p.

The next step would then be to build a binding to the robotic ROM image,
making it possible to control the robot from Ada.

HOD

Hans-Olof Danielsson, Danitek AB, Dragspelsv. 20, S-732 32 Arboga, Sweden
Tel: int +46 589 140 38, Email: Hans-Olof.Danielsson@swipnet.se
Web: www.node98.com/danitek, Member of Node98  www.node98.com


"Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com> wrote:
>
> I'm taking a look at the PC/104 card info from: http://www.pc104.org/ It
> looks interesting, but as far as I can tell, you'd probably have some
> retargeting issues for GNAT no matter what you did. And of course,
embedded
> programming is more than finding GNAT and RTEMS for some target hardware -
> you really need a lot of additional software for it to be useful. From the
> hardware side, you'd need to have some basic electrical things like A/Ds,
> D/As, (F/Ds, maybe?) discretes & ports that would be useful for student
> projects and representative of real-world development.
>
> I'm going to examine the PC/104 thing a bit more thoroughly. If you think
of
> any other possibilities for an SBC to which GNAT might target with minimal
> fuss, let me know... Thanks.
>
> MDC
> --
> Marin David Condic
> Senior Software Engineer
> Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
> Enabling the digital revolution
> e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
> Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/
>
>
>
> "Tarjei T. Jensen" <tarjei.jensen@kvaerner.com> wrote in message
> news:972uon$729@news.kvaerner.com...
> > It is clearly commercial possibilities if you can find a decent and
cheap
> > PC/104 card or a PC motherboard/bios to work with. Then it should be a
> matter
> > of documenting how to use gnat and/or RTEMS to get results. You may have
> to
> > write a few drivers for the network card or graphics card.
> >
> > You would have a great teaching tool and a easy kit to commercialize.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> comp.lang.ada mailing list
> comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org
> http://ada.eu.org/mailman/listinfo/comp.lang.ada

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Jerry Petrey]

Hans-Olof Danielsson wrote:
> 
> Another option is the Lego Mindstorm robotics kit.
> 
> The robotics contains a Hitachi H8 microcontroller which is supported by the
> latest GCC version. Recently there was a posting on the *crossgcc* list
> regarding building a C cross compiler for H8 with GNU/Linux as host , so
> there is at least a GCC-based C cross compilor.
> 
> When GNAT moves to GCC common source tree ( according to earlier posting on
> this cla-list, that is planed for GCC 3.1 ) it shouldn�t be to difficult to
> build a GNAT cross compiler for H8. It might be equaly easy ( or difficult )
> with GCC 2.81 ( if it supports H8 ) used for GNAT 3.13p.
> 
> The next step would then be to build a binding to the robotic ROM image,
> making it possible to control the robot from Ada.
> 
> HOD
> 


There is a GNAT Ada interface for the Mindstorms kit
available at:

http://www.usafa.af.mil/dfcs/adamindstorms.htm

It is not complete but a nice start.

Jerry
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Jerry Petrey                                                
-- Senior Principal Systems Engineer - Navigation, Guidance, & Control
-- Raytheon Missile Systems          - Member Team Ada & Team Forth
-- NOTE: please remove <NOSPAM> in email address to
reply                  
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Cesar Rabak]

Marin David Condic wrote:
> > I disagree, but see below.
> >
> You disagree? Does this mean you know of a good Ada compiler targeted to an
> inexpensive SBC that would fit the description? Or are you saying that
> porting an Ada compiler to some SBC would be no big deal? In either case,
> I'd definitely like to challenge you to verify this through demonstration.
> :-)

OK. I'll elaborate!

I don't know of any good Ada compiler targeted to inexpensive SBC or
LCDS.

As already posted elsewhere in this thread, I second the position that
perhaps porting is not the principal problem, but rather to assemble all
the pieces, including a targeted tutorial (with exercises), etc.

So perhaps we agree in the factual observation, and my disagreeing is
more in the sizing of the opportunity.

> >
> Well the world has become a lot bigger than 8 bit microcontrollers. 

Agreed. But you see 32 bits processors abundant in kits designed for
instructional use?

>I am
> currently working with a box that has a MIPS processor and almost the whole
> system on a single chip. So a 32-bit processor able to control some
> physical/electrical devices from a single board at an inexpensive price is
> not at all out of the question. The problem is: Which One? 

This is an interesting question! It had to be inexpensive with abundant
(and perhaps free) documentation available, and if possible a chip which
people would feel it is worthwhile to expend time on it.

>If you are
> familiar with embedded systems, I'm sure you know that there just aren't
> thousands of Ada ports out there for popular boards/development kits. You
> need the compiler, plus a good, powerful linker & cross-target debugger
> along with probably some available libraries, bootstrap code, descent
> documentation of everything, etc. Saying "Well GNAT has a port to chip X
> available somewhere on the net..." is interesting, but if you don't have all
> the pieces pulled together into a nicely integrated package that works
> reliably, it wouldn't make a good student environment. (It's hard enough for
> the pros to figure out how to get this sort of thing to work - how much
> harder would it be for the neophytes? :-)

Second in full.

> 
> I'm always interested in hearing ideas on this topic if you have any.
> Thanks.

I think a way to reduce the 'initial' cost of a such project would be to
detect the 20% of board/kits which have the 80% of the "market" and have
the ports (with all the provisos above mentioned) funded.

On a second but necessarily concurrent front, we need to create a mind
share in users/instructors/industry about the use of Ada for embedded
systems. Otherwise, I feel the whole exercise will doomed.

Cesar

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Marin David Condic]

I've seen plenty of development kits wherein some company will sell you a
developmental version of their SBC, the cross compiler, (related tools), cable to
your PC & documentation for in the neighborhood of $500. (Of course, this is with
C as the programming language.) That ought to be within the budget of the serious
student if it was used for more than one class. It would at least be within the
budget of the school's computer lab to have 3 or 4 available for student's to do
their lab work on. A company selling the kit might give away several sets of their
documentation or make them available at an inexpensive price, so I don't see much
standing in the way of students getting the material they need.

The real problem is having a similar environment with an Ada compiler. No
technical reason why it couldn't exist at a similar price - just apparently not an
economic powerhouse or someone would have likely done it by now.

(My favorite Alan Greenspan joke: Greenspan is walking down the street with his
wife. His wife sees a $20 bill on the ground and points it out to Alan. He
replies: "You must be mistaken dear. If there were a $20 bill on the ground,
someone would have picked it up by now!")

MDC

Cesar Rabak wrote:

> >I am
> > currently working with a box that has a MIPS processor and almost the whole
> > system on a single chip. So a 32-bit processor able to control some
> > physical/electrical devices from a single board at an inexpensive price is
> > not at all out of the question. The problem is: Which One?
>
> This is an interesting question! It had to be inexpensive with abundant
> (and perhaps free) documentation available, and if possible a chip which
> people would feel it is worthwhile to expend time on it.

--
=============================================================
Marin David Condic - Pace Micro - http://www.pacemicro.com/
Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ a c m . o r g
Visit my web site at:  http://www.mcondic.com/

    "I'd trade it all for just a little more"
        --  Charles Montgomery Burns, [4F10]
=============================================================

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Cesar Rabak]

Marin David Condic wrote:
> 
> I've seen plenty of development kits wherein some company will sell you a
> developmental version of their SBC, the cross compiler, (related tools), cable to
> your PC & documentation for in the neighborhood of $500. (Of course, this is with
> C as the programming language.) That ought to be within the budget of the serious
> student if it was used for more than one class.

Besides being within the budget it must in the so called "mind share".
$500 may do a descent upgrade in the PC box (out monitor)!

Some time ago I taught in a technical school and they used some Rigel
boards (www.rigelcorp.com). They had some very affordable boards which
would be within budget even of hobbyists (IIRC < US$100).

In this price range, I'm affraid we'll get stuck to the present
situation! Only people who 'fall in love with Ada' will purchase for
their own...


> It would at least be within the
> budget of the school's computer lab to have 3 or 4 available for student's to do
> their lab work on. A company selling the kit might give away several sets of their
> documentation or make them available at an inexpensive price, so I don't see much
> standing in the way of students getting the material they need.

Yes, for schools' labs this is a feasible range.
Also I think you're quite right one (or more, let's try to be optimistic
;-) textbooks will also make a difference.

> 
> The real problem is having a similar environment with an Ada compiler. No
> technical reason why it couldn't exist at a similar price - just apparently not an
> economic powerhouse or someone would have likely done it by now.
> 

Yes I feel this is turning to be the 'chicken and egg' problem. As the
perceived use of Ada is diminishing, the perceived opportunity for the
teaching material has the same trend. Also be in the corporate or
embedded systems realms, less and less Ada is being tought as a
"mainstream" language. So right now nor the powerhouse, it seems to be
seen as a flashlight battery!


> (My favorite Alan Greenspan joke: Greenspan is walking down the street with his
> wife. His wife sees a $20 bill on the ground and points it out to Alan. He
> replies: "You must be mistaken dear. If there were a $20 bill on the ground,
> someone would have picked it up by now!")

Neat!

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Marin David Condic]

"Cesar Rabak" <csrabak@uol.com.br> wrote in message
news:3A99A4B3.694445DD@uol.com.br...
> Marin David Condic wrote:
> >
> > I've seen plenty of development kits wherein some company will sell you
a
> > developmental version of their SBC, the cross compiler, (related tools),
cable to
> > your PC & documentation for in the neighborhood of $500. (Of course,
this is with
> > C as the programming language.) That ought to be within the budget of
the serious
> > student if it was used for more than one class.
>
> Besides being within the budget it must in the so called "mind share".
> $500 may do a descent upgrade in the PC box (out monitor)!
>
Well, if you think about it, this may not be an issue at all. Consider the
possibility that the school's computer lab has a handful of the development
boards & the base compiler is a GNAT variant. A student with a PC could hack
the code at home on his PC & make sure it compiles - perhaps even testing
parts of it without the SBC, then take it to the lab for full-up testing. No
big expenditure there except for the need to have a PC.


> Some time ago I taught in a technical school and they used some Rigel
> boards (www.rigelcorp.com). They had some very affordable boards which
> would be within budget even of hobbyists (IIRC < US$100).
>
> In this price range, I'm affraid we'll get stuck to the present
> situation! Only people who 'fall in love with Ada' will purchase for
> their own...
>
To some extent, the "falling in love with Ada" may not be important. *IF*
there was a really spiffy kit out there that pretty much provided an
embedded programming class in a bag, profs would be *REALLY TEMPTED* to use
whatever was available, even if they weren't thrilled with the language or
SBC architecture. Mostly, this is because it eliminates so much work for
them.


>
> > It would at least be within the
> > budget of the school's computer lab to have 3 or 4 available for
student's to do
> > their lab work on. A company selling the kit might give away several
sets of their
> > documentation or make them available at an inexpensive price, so I don't
see much
> > standing in the way of students getting the material they need.
>
> Yes, for schools' labs this is a feasible range.
> Also I think you're quite right one (or more, let's try to be optimistic
> ;-) textbooks will also make a difference.
>
Yup. You'd need a good textbook with plenty of examples & homework problems
based on the SBC you chose. I don't think that is impossible, but it
certainly is non-trivial.


> >
> > The real problem is having a similar environment with an Ada compiler.
No
> > technical reason why it couldn't exist at a similar price - just
apparently not an
> > economic powerhouse or someone would have likely done it by now.
> >
>
> Yes I feel this is turning to be the 'chicken and egg' problem. As the
> perceived use of Ada is diminishing, the perceived opportunity for the
> teaching material has the same trend. Also be in the corporate or
> embedded systems realms, less and less Ada is being tought as a
> "mainstream" language. So right now nor the powerhouse, it seems to be
> seen as a flashlight battery!
>
Well, as I observed above - even if Ada is not perceived as popular, simply
having the kit available would start creating the demand. Profs have way too
many other things to do with their time and don't necessarily want to design
an intro-level embedded programming course. Or maybe they'd like to have
one, but there is a perceived lack of materials. Being the guys who had an
off-the-shelf, shrink-wrapped course would be a good position to be in.
They'd want it no matter what the details are just because it lets them
provide an educational experience at minimal cost & time.


>
> > (My favorite Alan Greenspan joke: Greenspan is walking down the street
with his
> > wife. His wife sees a $20 bill on the ground and points it out to Alan.
He
> > replies: "You must be mistaken dear. If there were a $20 bill on the
ground,
> > someone would have picked it up by now!")
>
> Neat!

I hear that Bill Gates' hourly earnings are so high that if he dropped a $20
bill on the ground it would cost him more to bend over and pick it up than
it is worth. :-)

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/

non-Ada, was Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[tmoran]

>I hear that Bill Gates' hourly earnings are so high that if he dropped a $20
>bill on the ground it would cost him more to bend over and pick it up than
>it is worth. :-)
  At two seconds/pick up, any of those folks making over $72M/year should
ignore $20 bills on the ground.  Most software engineers should ignore
single pennys, but be on the lookout for nickels. ;)

Model railroad package (was: Re: Increased Interest In Ada?)

[Dirk Craeynest]

In article <970ma1$1l7$1@nh.pace.co.uk>,
Marin David Condic <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com> wrote:
> I could imagine Ada being popular in electrical engineering
> departments if there were a convenient and inexpensive (maybe free?)
> Ada environment for playing around with embedded computing. [...]
> I am thinking of Dr. McCormick's model railroad class [...]
> If [...] was packaged as "An embedded programming course in a bag" so
> that a prof could just pick it up and start teaching it, this might
> go a long way toward encouraging Ada as an educational tool as well
> as a practical tool for building real-world systems.
>
> (Does anyone smell commercial possibilities here? :-)

Some time ago, John McCormick told me he was looking into exactly that:
commercialising the hardware and software for his model railroad class
in order for others to be able to buy it "off the shelf" and use it for
similar classes at other universities.

I contacted him to check what progress has been made.  John's reply is
reposted here for your information, with his approval (see below).

Dirk (Dirk.Craeynest@cs.kuleuven.ac.be for Ada-Belgium e-mail)

--
Dirk Craeynest            | Email Dirk.Craeynest@offis.be | Ada-Belgium
Offis nv/sa - Aubay Group | Phone +32(2)725.40.25         | Ada-Europe
Weiveldlaan 41/32         |       +32(2)729.97.36 (work)  | ACM SIGAda
B-1930 Zaventem, Belgium  | Fax   +32(2)725.40.12         | Team Ada

*** Intl. Conference on Reliable Software Technologies - Ada-Europe'2001
*** May 14-18, 2001, Leuven, Belgium **** http://www.ada-europe.org/ ***

---

Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2001 08:35:15 -0600
To: Dirk Craeynest <Dirk.Craeynest@cs.kuleuven.ac.be>
From: John McCormick <mccormic@cs.uni.edu>
Subject: Re: Model railroad package? (2nd attempt)

Hi Dirk!

Just got back from a conference and am trying to get through all of the
e-mail that accumulated.  Yes we are still missing a good deal from the
old server.

I don't follow comp.lang.ada.  I am indeed working on just such a
project.  Ultimately it would include:

1. Printed circuit boards to make it easy to connect a model railroad
to one or more computers.  The connections are made through D/A, A/D,
and digital I/O on the computer end which should make it possible to
use just about any computer

2. An Ada environment for developing software.

3. A sample program that can be easily adapted to any railroad geometry.

4. An undergraduate level introductory textbook on real-time embedded
systems based on the train layout.  Of course, it will use Ada as the
development language.  This piece of the project is still in the
dreaming stage.

The hardware development is being supported by two local corporations:
Rockwell-Collins (avionics) and Maytag (household appliances).  My
target date for completing the hardware is the end of this summer.

Feel free to pass this information on to anyone interested.

John

-------------------------------------------------------
John W. McCormick                mccormick@cs.uni.edu
Computer Science Department      john.mccormick@acm.org
University of Northern Iowa      voice (319) 273-6056
Cedar Falls, IA 50614-0507       fax (319) 273-7123
http://www.cs.uni.edu/~mccormic/

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Peter Amey]

Marin David Condic wrote:
> 
> That sounds interesting. I'm wondering what sort of students you present
> this to and what are the learning objectives? Do you think they learn much
> about the embedded aspects, or do they learn more about realtime
> programming?
> 

Our aim is to teach the design and static analysis aspects of SPARK. 
The low-level, real-time aspects of the project are not particularly
important.  The aim of the emulator is more to give students
satisfaction: they write all this stuff, the SPARK Examiner tells them
it is good but they didn't used to get to see it working.  The emulator
just gives that extra satisfaction.  (Incidently, the first time the
"model answer" had ever been compiled or run was when we tested the
emulator - up to then it had only been analysed - it worked perfectly
first time).


> My concern is that such a simulation would be useful for developing the high
> level algorithms for embedded, realtime controls, but probably won't do a
> good job of teaching the low level aspects of embedded programming. At the
> high level, embedded programming looks much like any other kind of
> programming - albeit, within a specialized problem domain. What I'd like to
> find is a good, inexpensive way of teaching the low level aspects - things
> like accessing different kinds of memory, interfacing to I/O devices,
> utilizing hardware interrupts, etc. as well as the higher level concepts of
> device control. You just don't get much of a feel for real embedded
> programming unless you've had to spend time fighting with a linker to get
> things located at specific places, or struggling to get bootstrap code to
> load your software across a comm link, or get into the "Broken
> Software/Broken Hardware" debate.

I think you are probably right, but for our particular purpose this was
not an issue.

[snip]

Peter

-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------------------   
      __         Peter Amey, Product Manager
        )                    Praxis Critical Systems Ltd
       /                     20, Manvers Street, Bath, BA1 1PX
      / 0        Tel: +44 (0)1225 466991
     (_/         Fax: +44 (0)1225 469006
                 http://www.praxis-cs.co.uk/

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Rush Kester]

There are two Ada interfaces to the Lego Mindstorms robotics kit already
available.
One is Ada to NQC developed by Barry Fagin at the US Air Force Academy,
see http://www.usafa.af.mil/dfcs/adamindstorms.htm  The other is a binding
Lego's
SPIRIT.OCX active X control developed by David Botton, see
 http://www.adapower.com/gnatcom/mindstorm.zip

Rush Kester
Software Systems Engineer

Hans-Olof Danielsson wrote:

> Another option is the Lego Mindstorm robotics kit.
>
> The robotics contains a Hitachi H8 microcontroller which is supported by the
> latest GCC version. Recently there was a posting on the *crossgcc* list
> regarding building a C cross compiler for H8 with GNU/Linux as host , so
> there is at least a GCC-based C cross compilor.
>
> When GNAT moves to GCC common source tree ( according to earlier posting on
> this cla-list, that is planed for GCC 3.1 ) it shouldn�t be to difficult to
> build a GNAT cross compiler for H8. It might be equaly easy ( or difficult )
> with GCC 2.81 ( if it supports H8 ) used for GNAT 3.13p.
>
> The next step would then be to build a binding to the robotic ROM image,
> making it possible to control the robot from Ada.
>
> HOD
>
> Hans-Olof Danielsson, Danitek AB, Dragspelsv. 20, S-732 32 Arboga, Sweden
> Tel: int +46 589 140 38, Email: Hans-Olof.Danielsson@swipnet.se
> Web: www.node98.com/danitek, Member of Node98  www.node98.com
>
> "Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com> wrote:
> >
> > I'm taking a look at the PC/104 card info from: http://www.pc104.org/ It
> > looks interesting, but as far as I can tell, you'd probably have some
> > retargeting issues for GNAT no matter what you did. And of course,
> embedded
> > programming is more than finding GNAT and RTEMS for some target hardware -
> > you really need a lot of additional software for it to be useful. From the
> > hardware side, you'd need to have some basic electrical things like A/Ds,
> > D/As, (F/Ds, maybe?) discretes & ports that would be useful for student
> > projects and representative of real-world development.
> >
> > I'm going to examine the PC/104 thing a bit more thoroughly. If you think
> of
> > any other possibilities for an SBC to which GNAT might target with minimal
> > fuss, let me know... Thanks.
> >
> > MDC
> > --
> > Marin David Condic
> > Senior Software Engineer
> > Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
> > Enabling the digital revolution
> > e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
> > Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/
> >
> >
> >
> > "Tarjei T. Jensen" <tarjei.jensen@kvaerner.com> wrote in message
> > news:972uon$729@news.kvaerner.com...
> > > It is clearly commercial possibilities if you can find a decent and
> cheap
> > > PC/104 card or a PC motherboard/bios to work with. Then it should be a
> > matter
> > > of documenting how to use gnat and/or RTEMS to get results. You may have
> > to
> > > write a few drivers for the network card or graphics card.
> > >
> > > You would have a great teaching tool and a easy kit to commercialize.
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > comp.lang.ada mailing list
> > comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org
> > http://ada.eu.org/mailman/listinfo/comp.lang.ada

--

Rush Kester
Software Systems Engineer
AdaSoft at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab.
email:  rush.kester@jhuapl.edu
phone: (240) 228-3030 (live M-F 9:30am-4:30pm, voicemail anytime)
fax:      (240) 228-6779
http://hometown.aol.com/rwkester/myhomepage/index.html

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Rush Kester]

There are two Ada interfaces to the Lego Mindstorms robotics kit already
available.
One is Ada to NQC developed by Barry Fagin at the US Air Force Academy,
see http://www.usafa.af.mil/dfcs/adamindstorms.htm  The other is a binding
Lego's
SPIRIT.OCX active X control developed by David Botton, see
 http://www.adapower.com/gnatcom/mindstorm.zip

Rush Kester
Software Systems Engineer

Hans-Olof Danielsson wrote:

> Another option is the Lego Mindstorm robotics kit.
>
> The robotics contains a Hitachi H8 microcontroller which is supported by the
> latest GCC version. Recently there was a posting on the *crossgcc* list
> regarding building a C cross compiler for H8 with GNU/Linux as host , so
> there is at least a GCC-based C cross compilor.
>
> When GNAT moves to GCC common source tree ( according to earlier posting on
> this cla-list, that is planed for GCC 3.1 ) it shouldn�t be to difficult to
> build a GNAT cross compiler for H8. It might be equaly easy ( or difficult )
> with GCC 2.81 ( if it supports H8 ) used for GNAT 3.13p.
>
> The next step would then be to build a binding to the robotic ROM image,
> making it possible to control the robot from Ada.
>
> HOD
>
> Hans-Olof Danielsson, Danitek AB, Dragspelsv. 20, S-732 32 Arboga, Sweden
> Tel: int +46 589 140 38, Email: Hans-Olof.Danielsson@swipnet.se
> Web: www.node98.com/danitek, Member of Node98  www.node98.com
>
> "Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com> wrote:
> >
> > I'm taking a look at the PC/104 card info from: http://www.pc104.org/ It
> > looks interesting, but as far as I can tell, you'd probably have some
> > retargeting issues for GNAT no matter what you did. And of course,
> embedded
> > programming is more than finding GNAT and RTEMS for some target hardware -
> > you really need a lot of additional software for it to be useful. From the
> > hardware side, you'd need to have some basic electrical things like A/Ds,
> > D/As, (F/Ds, maybe?) discretes & ports that would be useful for student
> > projects and representative of real-world development.
> >
> > I'm going to examine the PC/104 thing a bit more thoroughly. If you think
> of
> > any other possibilities for an SBC to which GNAT might target with minimal
> > fuss, let me know... Thanks.
> >
> > MDC
> > --
> > Marin David Condic
> > Senior Software Engineer
> > Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
> > Enabling the digital revolution
> > e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
> > Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/
> >
> >
> >
> > "Tarjei T. Jensen" <tarjei.jensen@kvaerner.com> wrote in message
> > news:972uon$729@news.kvaerner.com...
> > > It is clearly commercial possibilities if you can find a decent and
> cheap
> > > PC/104 card or a PC motherboard/bios to work with. Then it should be a
> > matter
> > > of documenting how to use gnat and/or RTEMS to get results. You may have
> > to
> > > write a few drivers for the network card or graphics card.
> > >
> > > You would have a great teaching tool and a easy kit to commercialize.
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > comp.lang.ada mailing list
> > comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org
> > http://ada.eu.org/mailman/listinfo/comp.lang.ada

--

Rush Kester
Software Systems Engineer
AdaSoft at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab.
email:  rush.kester@jhuapl.edu
phone: (240) 228-3030 (live M-F 9:30am-4:30pm, voicemail anytime)
fax:      (240) 228-6779
http://hometown.aol.com/rwkester/myhomepage/index.html

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[DuckE]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2240 bytes --]

"Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com> wrote in
message news:970ma1$1l7$1@nh.pace.co.uk...
> I could imagine Ada being popular in electrical engineering departments if
> there were a convenient and inexpensive (maybe free?) Ada environment for
> playing around with embedded computing. It would have to work "off the
> shelf" with readily available hardware so that some prof could build a
> class/lab around it & students could afford to play with it on their own.
I
> am thinking of Dr. McCormick's model railroad class or the Lego robot
> discussed here a while ago. If either of these was packaged as "An
embedded
> programming course in a bag" so that a prof could just pick it up and
start
> teaching it, this might go a long way toward encouraging Ada as an
> educational tool as well as a practical tool for building real-world
> systems.
>

I have been thinking that GNAT/RTEMS might in the not-too-distant future
provide just such an environment.  Unfortunately the two are somewhat out of
sync right now.  I belive the situation will be much better when GCC 3.0 (or
3.1) comes out later this year (hopefully).

I envision old PC's as an ideal target for students wanting to play around
with embedded work since 486's are, at least in my area, cheap and easy to
come by since nobody wants them any more.

SteveD

> (Does anyone smell commercial possibilities here? :-)
>
> MDC
> --
> Marin David Condic
> Senior Software Engineer
> Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
> Enabling the digital revolution
> e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
> Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/
>
>
>
> "Preben Randhol" <randhol+abuse@pvv.org> wrote in message
> news:slrn997li7.193.randhol+abuse@kiuk0156.chembio.ntnu.no...
> > On Tue, 20 Feb 2001 21:27:16 +0100, Frank wrote:
> > >Hi!
> > >
> > >Are there Ada courses on NTNU?
> >
> > Not that I know of. The Computer Science dep uses Java and C++ I think,
> > but perhaps the Electronics department use some Ada. Sadly the
> > introductory computer courses are now in Fortran and Java. :-(
> >
> > --
> > Preben Randhol ------------------- http://www.pvv.org/~randhol/ --
> >                  �For me, Ada95 puts back the joy in programming.�
>
>

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Singlespeeder]

The inferno operating system can export a namespace to the Lego brick using
styx. But are there any Ada compilers for Inferno?

see http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/lego1.html

nick

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Marin David Condic]

Old PCs may have their advantages, but I'd like to see a setup that had
features this wouldn't necessarily provide. For one thing - just the pure
"bare board" nature of embedded computing might not be well illustrated by a
PC, considering they already have prefabricated solutions to typical
embedded problems like "How do I actually get code loaded into this board &
cycling?" For another thing, they don't commonly have things like EEPROM,
A/D converters & discretes on-board. (You'd like to give students a machine
that is not what they are typically used to and pose the question "Well, how
are you going to solve Problem X when you don't have a disk drive and a
video monitor available???") You might also want a development kit that
reflected as much as possible current state-of-the-art hardware. If one were
to go to all the trouble of pulling the pieces together, it might be nice if
there were commercial spinoffs as well. :-)

If you look around a little, you'll notice there are available SBC's with
development kits that are priced in the small-handful-of hundreds-of dollars
($200..$500?) I don't think the hardware cost (until you get into
peripherials!) needs to be so high as to send someone off looking for old PC
boards at the junk yard. The problem is that they typically are available
only with a C compiler environment. It would be nice to have a similar setup
with an Ada compiler & some other related stuff that would make it useful
for education and possibly "real world" usage........

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"DuckE" <nospam_steved94@home.com> wrote in message
news:Yjhq6.539700$U46.16061033@news1.sttls1.wa.home.com...
>
> I envision old PC's as an ideal target for students wanting to play around
> with embedded work since 486's are, at least in my area, cheap and easy to
> come by since nobody wants them any more.
>

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Tarjei T. Jensen]

Marin David Condic wrote in message <98inu2$1fr$1@nh.pace.co.uk>...
>Old PCs may have their advantages, but I'd like to see a setup that had
>features this wouldn't necessarily provide. For one thing - just the pure
>"bare board" nature of embedded computing might not be well illustrated by
a
>PC, considering they already have prefabricated solutions to typical
>embedded problems like "How do I actually get code loaded into this board &
>cycling?" For another thing, they don't commonly have things like EEPROM,
>A/D converters & discretes on-board. (You'd like to give students a machine
>that is not what they are typically used to and pose the question "Well,
how
>are you going to solve Problem X when you don't have a disk drive and a
>video monitor available???") You might also want a development kit that
>reflected as much as possible current state-of-the-art hardware. If one
were
>to go to all the trouble of pulling the pieces together, it might be nice
if
>there were commercial spinoffs as well. :-)

Doing this should be a two stage approach. Stage 1 is using off the shelf
hardware like a standard PC. Stage 2 would involve working on an embedded
kit. That way the money last. I don't think embedded intel kits are
particularly cheap. And if you want a kit for everybody then it isn't cheap
anymore.

As for what you can connect to a PC; only your imagination limits you. The
last two issues of Elektor has articles on a DIY PCI card. The card is
available so that you can use it for prototyping. All sorts of things are
possible. Then we have parallell and serial ports, network cards, scsi and
gpib controllers, etc.

Greetings,

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Marin David Condic]

I think that misses the point. The point was to create an environment in
which students could learn techniques for programming embedded computers. If
you give them a PC as the target, it pretty much defeats the whole game
since it looks just about like any other kind of programming. Especially if
you give them a PC with some version of MS-DOS or Windoze on it since that
just about eliminates the need for them to develop their own OS code.

Sure, hooking PCs to stuff and writing software for it can be a good
realtime experience, but I was looking at the notion of providing an
environment that reflects a whole different kind of problem space.

Just for grins, I plugged some words into Google and turned up:
http://www.zworld.com/index.html - you might pay them a visit and look at
the cost of their boards/development products. They're advertising their
"RabbitCore 2000" development kit for $169. (I'm sure you can plus it up
with plenty of options, but that's not a bad starting point, is it?) If
there was a little SBC like this with an Ada compiler, I think it might make
a good basis for an embedded programming class....

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/



"Tarjei T. Jensen" <tarjei.jensen@kvaerner.com> wrote in message
news:98kjgv$3j69@news.kvaerner.com...
> Doing this should be a two stage approach. Stage 1 is using off the shelf
> hardware like a standard PC. Stage 2 would involve working on an embedded
> kit. That way the money last. I don't think embedded intel kits are
> particularly cheap. And if you want a kit for everybody then it isn't
cheap
> anymore.
>
> As for what you can connect to a PC; only your imagination limits you. The
> last two issues of Elektor has articles on a DIY PCI card. The card is
> available so that you can use it for prototyping. All sorts of things are
> possible. Then we have parallell and serial ports, network cards, scsi and
> gpib controllers, etc.
>

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[John Kern]

Marin David Condic wrote:
> 
> I'm taking a look at the PC/104 card info from: http://www.pc104.org/ It
> looks interesting, but as far as I can tell, you'd probably have some
> retargeting issues for GNAT no matter what you did. And of course, embedded
> programming is more than finding GNAT and RTEMS for some target hardware -
> you really need a lot of additional software for it to be useful. From the
> hardware side, you'd need to have some basic electrical things like A/Ds,
> D/As, (F/Ds, maybe?) discretes & ports that would be useful for student
> projects and representative of real-world development.
> 
> I'm going to examine the PC/104 thing a bit more thoroughly. If you think of
> any other possibilities for an SBC to which GNAT might target with minimal
> fuss, let me know... Thanks.
> 


A readily available computer that comes to mind would be a Palm OS
computer of some kind.  It may be a tricky to demonstrate the real-time
aspects, but the embedded parts should still be similar to the kinds of
things needed for SBCs, ie. memory maps, low level key debouncing,
display memory map, etc.  There is an unused on-board microphone on my
Visor.  The people at the Mathworks have a Stateflow code generation
demo at:
http://www.mathworks.com/company/digest/december00/codegen.shtml
They even indicate that the processor is a Motorola 68328 for which a
GNAT port might already exist.

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[John Kern]

I think there exists a free version of CodeWarrior that addresses most
of these issues for Palm programming.  The downloading mechanism is
build into the cradle mechanism and the docs should be available.  I've
even seen a PC emulator somewhere.

Marin David Condic wrote:
> 
> I have some small familiarity with GNAT/RTEMS - which is to say I basically
> know what it does, but with no knowledge of how it actually does it.
> Basically, this wouldn't be a bad way to go.; Let's say, for the sake of
> argument, that one had a version of GNAT that ran on a PC and was targeted
> to a bare board MC68040 processor. One would need to compile RTEMS to this
> processor to have the runtime services needed by Ada for tasking, etc. From
> there, you would compile your application using GNAT and link it with RTEMS
> & then have an image that would be executable on this bare board MC68040.
> (Someone correct me if I'm fundamentally wrong - details at this point don't
> concern me...)
> 
> Key to this would be that you'd need a fairly sophisticated linkage editor
> that ran on the PC and targeted the 68040. You'd need to be able to locate
> chunks of code/data in specific memory locations because presumably you'd
> have things like EEPROM and DMA devices, etc.You'd have to get out of it
> some kind of load image in a usable format (ELF or S-Records or whatever).
> 
> From there you need some means of getting the load image into the bare board
> machine. That means having a PROM burner or some kind of bootstrap code
> loaded on the machine to pull data off of some port and start loading it at
> addresses required. The bootstrap needs some kind of software at the other
> end of the port to read the loadable image and feed it the bits & bytes in
> some protocol it understands.
> 
> Now the important thing to note here is that this is the *BARE MINIMUM* one
> needs *JUST TO GET STARTED PROGRAMMING*. (sorry for shouting!) You'd still
> want things like a source level debugger, some kind of on-board monitor to
> wrap with your application, probably some software packages that could be
> used to shield you from device specifics (although that would obviously be
> one of the student exercises, you'd want them to be able to work with them
> only as required by the course & just have some stuff available for the
> other devices.) We could obviously go on with wanting things - like a
> JTAG/EJTAG interface with software at the PC end, etc. I can easily imagine
> *wanting* a lot! :-)
> 
> While we're at it, we'd need real good documentation for the SBC and its
> hardware devices because you couldn't expect students to just simply *know*
> how to write code for Brand X A/D Converter and it would be a lot to ask
> them to go start pestering vendors for data books. (Hell! It's a whole lot
> to ask of us professionals - but at least we can justify it along the lines
> of "If the company is too *stupid* to go get me the manuals I need, I'll
> burn up their money surfing the net or calling the companies until I get
> it.) Documentation would have to extend to the overall system as well.
> Someone has to answer the question "How do I go from some source file with
> the embedded "Hello World" program in it to code actually cycling in the
> box?"
> 
> From there, we'd need to either find or write some kind of college level
> text that addressed embedded programming from the level of all the things
> that will go on in our little SBC. I have only run into one text that
> addresses this at all ("Programming Embedded Systems In C And C++" by
> Michael Barr) and it only addresses some of the things you'd likely see in
> an embedded computer - and as is obvious, not from the Ada perspective. (If
> you know of others, I'd be glad to hear about them. I'd like to see
> something that dealt with things like A/Ds and the devices that live at the
> other end of them.)
> 
> Now the problem as I see it is this: Nobody has all these pieces pulled
> together all in one place using Ada (at a low price, at least), but it
> *DOES* exist (mostly) for C and maybe C++. You can go to any number of
> vendors who will sell you an SBC development kit that will plug into your PC
> with all the appropriate software at the PC end, etc. You can be up and
> programming the card with C in short order and maybe the only thing you're
> really missing is the college level text. Pulling together all this stuff in
> Ada is certainly feasable, but it would be a non-trivial amount of work.
> 
> Since great minds think alike, I'll agree with you that the PR value for Ada
> would be high because it would demonstrate how easy Ada is relative to C in
> this arena. I'd go one step further in saying that *IF* the kit were to
> exist, a *LOT* of EE profs would be tempted to structure a course around it
> because it would eliminate a ton of work for them - hence even more PR
> value. Throw on top of it that every EE student who's first embedded
> experience is Ada would likely go on to industry with a favorable impression
> of Ada and start pushing for its adoption. And of course, if the card itself
> were fairly generally useful, you've got a commercial market for it as well.
> 
> My only problem with this idea is that my full-time occupation is not the
> development of such kits and as a speculative, part-time venture I just
> don't think I've got the time to do it. (Not in any reasonable timeframe!)
> Maybe a vendor or professor or idle-rich-kid (or several of them) might get
> interested and start pulling the pieces together.
> 
> MDC
> 
> --
> Marin David Condic
> Senior Software Engineer
> Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
> Enabling the digital revolution
> e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
> Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/
> 
> "Tarjei T. Jensen" <tarjei.jensen@kvaerner.com> wrote in message
> news:97668g$718@news.kvaerner.com...
> >
> > Marin David Condic wrote
> > >I'm going to examine the PC/104 thing a bit more thoroughly. If you think
> of
> > >any other possibilities for an SBC to which GNAT might target with
> minimal
> > >fuss, let me know... Thanks.
> >
> > Check with oarcorp. They have something about a GNAT/RTEMS combo on their
> front
> > page. That might be worthwhile to examine.
> >
> > I suspect that anything quick and easy for a student/hobbyist to do is
> hard to
> > find information on. It seems to be the Ada way. I think the PR value of
> such a
> > "kit" would be incalcuable because everybody could see that Ada is easy.
> It
> > would be ridiculously easy to check it out for yourself.
> >
> > Greetings,
> >
> >
> >
> >

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Tarjei T. Jensen]

Marin David Condic wrote in message <98lc03$23l$1@nh.pace.co.uk>...
>I think that misses the point. The point was to create an environment in
>which students could learn techniques for programming embedded computers.
If
>you give them a PC as the target, it pretty much defeats the whole game
>since it looks just about like any other kind of programming. Especially if
>you give them a PC with some version of MS-DOS or Windoze on it since that
>just about eliminates the need for them to develop their own OS code.

The point is to phase things in. Having MSDOS onboard is nice when you teach
them how to handle interrupts, sampling instruments, snooping the network
card, etc. After they master that is the time to go furter. Don't let them
run into the wall at full speed. Let them learn a bit first, get some
experience.


Greetings,

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Marin David Condic]

Well, I suppose you could have a "Intro To Realtime Programming - 101" class
that used PCs/MS-DOS as the basis & let students work with things that have
some realtime requirement. But there should be a "Embedded System
Programming - 201(301? 401?)" course that involves a SBC with no OS and all
the typical problems that go with that. This is where I'd want to aim the
development kit. If all you want to do is teach some elements of realtime
systems, then you can get GNAT off-the-shelf and load it on a PC and just
design your course around it. If you want to teach "real" embedded
programming, you've got to have a "real" embedded machine, etc., and your
problem quickly becomes "no Ada for that setup." I was sort of shooting in
the direction of "What would it take to get an Ada Development Kit suitable
for that sort of course..."

MDC

--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Tarjei T. Jensen" <tarjei.jensen@kvaerner.com> wrote in message
news:98lf4h$jbe2@news.kvaerner.com...
> The point is to phase things in. Having MSDOS onboard is nice when you
teach
> them how to handle interrupts, sampling instruments, snooping the network
> card, etc. After they master that is the time to go furter. Don't let them
> run into the wall at full speed. Let them learn a bit first, get some
> experience.

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Jeffrey Carter]

Marin David Condic wrote:
> 
> Just for grins, I plugged some words into Google and turned up:
> http://www.zworld.com/index.html - you might pay them a visit and look at
> the cost of their boards/development products. They're advertising their
> "RabbitCore 2000" development kit for $169. (I'm sure you can plus it up
> with plenty of options, but that's not a bad starting point, is it?) If
> there was a little SBC like this with an Ada compiler, I think it might make
> a good basis for an embedded programming class....

This looks interesting. Perhaps you could organize a deal between ZWorld
for this kit, Averstar for their Ada-to-ANSI-C compiler, and an
interested Ada person like MDC to write some simple compilation scripts
to hide the C, and still offer it at a price that a student could
afford.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"I blow my nose on you."
Monty Python & the Holy Grail

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Tucker Taft]

Jeffrey Carter wrote:
> 
> Marin David Condic wrote:
> >
> > Just for grins, I plugged some words into Google and turned up:
> > http://www.zworld.com/index.html - you might pay them a visit and look at
> > the cost of their boards/development products. They're advertising their
> > "RabbitCore 2000" development kit for $169. (I'm sure you can plus it up
> > with plenty of options, but that's not a bad starting point, is it?) If
> > there was a little SBC like this with an Ada compiler, I think it might make
> > a good basis for an embedded programming class....
> 
> This looks interesting. Perhaps you could organize a deal between ZWorld
> for this kit, Averstar for their Ada-to-ANSI-C compiler, and an
> interested Ada person like MDC to write some simple compilation scripts
> to hide the C, and still offer it at a price that a student could
> afford.

Let me know how we could be of help.

> 
> --
> Jeff Carter
> "I blow my nose on you."
> Monty Python & the Holy Grail

-- 
-Tucker Taft   stt@avercom.net   http://www.averstar.com/~stt/
Chief Technology Officer, AverCom Corporation (A Titan Company) 
Burlington, MA  USA (AverCom was formerly the Commercial Division of AverStar:
http://www.averstar.com/services/ebusiness_applications.html)

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Marin David Condic]

I'm not sure I'd want to address that particular SBC - it was only an
example of the fact that there *are* inexpensive SBCs out there suitable for
a lot of things. They just typically come with some version of a C compiler
rather than an Ada compiler.

Targeting an Ada compiler to the Z-World products may or may not be a good
thing. It depends on lots of things - including how "standard" their C
compiler is and how popular their board is. Without buying the kit & working
with it for some stretch of time, its hard to say if it would be a good
target for such an effort.

Personally, I think it would be a *better* idea to have a native Ada
compiler that produced embedable code for some processor, then find an SBC
that used that processor. Gluing an Ada-toC-to-Embedded-Code thing together
is just going to ask for trouble and raise the inevitable question of "Why
don't I just use C, instead of going through all the extra steps & probably
giving up downstream features along the way?..."

MDC

--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/

"Tucker Taft" <stt@averstar.com> wrote in message
news:3AAFE454.B079E0F1@averstar.com...
> Jeffrey Carter wrote:
> >
> > Marin David Condic wrote:
> > >
> > > Just for grins, I plugged some words into Google and turned up:
> > > http://www.zworld.com/index.html - you might pay them a visit and look
at
> > > the cost of their boards/development products. They're advertising
their
> > > "RabbitCore 2000" development kit for $169. (I'm sure you can plus it
up
> > > with plenty of options, but that's not a bad starting point, is it?)
If
> > > there was a little SBC like this with an Ada compiler, I think it
might make
> > > a good basis for an embedded programming class....
> >
> > This looks interesting. Perhaps you could organize a deal between ZWorld
> > for this kit, Averstar for their Ada-to-ANSI-C compiler, and an
> > interested Ada person like MDC to write some simple compilation scripts
> > to hide the C, and still offer it at a price that a student could
> > afford.
>
> Let me know how we could be of help.
>
> >
> > --
> > Jeff Carter
> > "I blow my nose on you."
> > Monty Python & the Holy Grail
>
> --
> -Tucker Taft   stt@avercom.net   http://www.averstar.com/~stt/
> Chief Technology Officer, AverCom Corporation (A Titan Company)
> Burlington, MA  USA (AverCom was formerly the Commercial Division of
AverStar:
> http://www.averstar.com/services/ebusiness_applications.html)

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Tucker Taft]

Marin David Condic wrote:
> ...
> Personally, I think it would be a *better* idea to have a native Ada
> compiler that produced embedable code for some processor, then find an SBC
> that used that processor. Gluing an Ada-toC-to-Embedded-Code thing together
> is just going to ask for trouble and raise the inevitable question of "Why
> don't I just use C, instead of going through all the extra steps & probably
> giving up downstream features along the way?..."

Actually, one of the interesting things working with the version
of our Ada 95 technology that uses C as an intermediate is how
it illustrates exactly what you are giving up by going to C.
All of the consistency checks performed by Ada at compile-time,
plus the additional checks which are performed at run-time when
they can't be proved safe by the compiler, are generally all lost
when you write in C "by hand."  By looking at the generated
C you immediately see all the run-time checks that remain, and
it makes me cringe to think that people writing by hand in C
don't have any of those safety checks performed.  And that is *after*
our optimizer has already eliminated many of the provably-safe checks.

For what it is worth, the "glued together" compiler is actually
quite easy to use, and it "feels" like a regular Ada compiler, except
that if you want to check up on what the compiler is doing, you
can save and look at the generated C code rather than having
to look at the generated machine code.  By default, the intermediate
C code is deleted, so all that is left is a ".obj"/".o" just like
a "regular" compiler.

 
> 
> MDC
> 
> --
> Marin David Condic
> Senior Software Engineer
> Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
> Enabling the digital revolution
> e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
> Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/
-- 
-Tucker Taft   stt@avercom.net   http://www.averstar.com/~stt/
Chief Technology Officer, AverCom Corporation (A Titan Company) 
Burlington, MA  USA (AverCom was formerly the Commercial Division of AverStar:
http://www.averstar.com/services/ebusiness_applications.html)

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Marin David Condic]

Sounds interesting. Obviously, if the programmer doesn't see the C
intermediary steps and just gets code out the back end, then its just
another Ada compiler. However, I'd still have concerns about gluing it onto
someone's embedded C development environment because of the post-compilation
stuff. You need to play with the linkage editor & loader and it remains a
question in my mind if that is just going to invisibly look like Ada or if
you're going to need to treat it more from the intermediate C perspective.
After that, you've got to deal with the possible existence of source-level
debuggers and other testing tools. Are these going to see the Ada code - or
go referencing back to the C code?

I am not saying it can't be done or that doing it may not be of value. What
I'm saying is that it would likely require quite a bit of investigation just
to see what would be involved in doing the job and what quality the finished
product would have. After that there is certainly a non-trivial amount of
work in pulling the pieces together. If I was actively using the Z-World
board and familiar with its development environment, a lot of the assessment
would be already in my head. Without a funded mandate to go forth and kill,
its hard to justify the time committment. :-)

If we had a vendor interested in adding Ada as an additional front-end and
was willing to pay to merge the tools, that would really be something.
Unless I can talk my current employers into programming Cable-TV boxes in
Ada, I'm not likely to find the time to look into it. (Work is the curse of
the Language Advocate? :-)

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Tucker Taft" <stt@averstar.com> wrote in message
news:3AB0E994.A2B2D3C6@averstar.com...
> Actually, one of the interesting things working with the version
> of our Ada 95 technology that uses C as an intermediate is how
> it illustrates exactly what you are giving up by going to C.
> All of the consistency checks performed by Ada at compile-time,
> plus the additional checks which are performed at run-time when
> they can't be proved safe by the compiler, are generally all lost
> when you write in C "by hand."  By looking at the generated
> C you immediately see all the run-time checks that remain, and
> it makes me cringe to think that people writing by hand in C
> don't have any of those safety checks performed.  And that is *after*
> our optimizer has already eliminated many of the provably-safe checks.
>
> For what it is worth, the "glued together" compiler is actually
> quite easy to use, and it "feels" like a regular Ada compiler, except
> that if you want to check up on what the compiler is doing, you
> can save and look at the generated C code rather than having
> to look at the generated machine code.  By default, the intermediate
> C code is deleted, so all that is left is a ".obj"/".o" just like
> a "regular" compiler.
>

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Tucker Taft]

Marin David Condic wrote:
> 
> Sounds interesting. Obviously, if the programmer doesn't see the C
> intermediary steps and just gets code out the back end, then its just
> another Ada compiler. However, I'd still have concerns about gluing it onto
> someone's embedded C development environment because of the post-compilation
> stuff. You need to play with the linkage editor & loader and it remains a
> question in my mind if that is just going to invisibly look like Ada or if
> you're going to need to treat it more from the intermediate C perspective.

There is an "adabuild" linker that does whatever automatic
recompilation is required, builds a "main" routine (which
elaborates the appropriate library units and calls the Ada main and
then the library-level finalizer), and then invokes the
target linker to finish the job.  It works exactly like
the versions of our compiler that don't use C from the user's
perspective.

> After that, you've got to deal with the possible existence of source-level
> debuggers and other testing tools. Are these going to see the Ada code - or
> go referencing back to the C code?

These see the Ada source (unless you explicitly specify otherwise) thanks
to the "#line" directives included in the generated C source code.
Ada variable names are carried over into the C in a canonical form
(first letter capitalized, all others lower case), which may take
some getting used-to, though if you have a debugger that shows
the local variables, they can easily be picked out.

> 
> I am not saying it can't be done or that doing it may not be of value. What
> I'm saying is that it would likely require quite a bit of investigation just
> to see what would be involved in doing the job and what quality the finished
> product would have. After that there is certainly a non-trivial amount of
> work in pulling the pieces together. If I was actively using the Z-World
> board and familiar with its development environment, a lot of the assessment
> would be already in my head. Without a funded mandate to go forth and kill,
> its hard to justify the time committment. :-)

It certainly is not just like falling off a log, but it isn't rocket
science either...
> 
> If we had a vendor interested in adding Ada as an additional front-end and
> was willing to pay to merge the tools, that would really be something.
> Unless I can talk my current employers into programming Cable-TV boxes in
> Ada, I'm not likely to find the time to look into it. (Work is the curse of
> the Language Advocate? :-)

Time is the one commodity whose price never drops...

> 
> MDC
> --
> Marin David Condic
> Senior Software Engineer
> Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
> Enabling the digital revolution
> e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
> Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/

-- 
-Tucker Taft   stt@avercom.net   http://www.averstar.com/~stt/
Chief Technology Officer, AverCom Corporation (A Titan Company) 
Burlington, MA  USA (AverCom was formerly the Commercial Division of AverStar:
http://www.averstar.com/services/ebusiness_applications.html)

Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Tarjei T. Jensen]

Tucker Taft wrote
>For what it is worth, the "glued together" compiler is actually
>quite easy to use, and it "feels" like a regular Ada compiler, except
>that if you want to check up on what the compiler is doing, you
>can save and look at the generated C code rather than having
>to look at the generated machine code.  By default, the intermediate
>C code is deleted, so all that is left is a ".obj"/".o" just like
>a "regular" compiler.

It looks like something a small company could market (part time?). After all
there are still a lot of bang left in Z80 (HD180??), 6809 and similar
devices. Many would probably be interested in a game boy target. Whether
they would be able to pay much is an entirely different matter.

Greetings,