Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

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

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

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