Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Peter Amey <pna@praxis-cs.co.uk>]

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