Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

[Cesar Rabak <csrabak@uol.com.br>]

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...