Re: Ada Annex E (Just curious :-)

[Jeffrey Carter <jrcarter@acm.org>]

Ted Dennison wrote:
> 
> Admittedly, I don't know all that much about Annex E. But in this situation, why
> wouldn't you prefer to have direct compiler support for putting tasks on
> different processors, rather than mess with Annex E? The Harris Nighthawk
> (Ada83) compiler worked that way (and was quite nice for hard-realtime). Ada
> 95's protected types seem tailor-made for this kind of setup. I'd think Annex E
> would be more suited to a situation where you have multiple processors that
> share *no* memory and must communicate through I/O.

One can argue that Annex E is completely superfluous. One could have a
compiler that targeted a distributed system, and converted all intertask
communications (rendezvous and protected operations) into network
messages. A program for a distributed system could look exactly like a
program for a multiprocessor, which would make porting from one to the
other much simpler.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"Son of a window-dresser."
Monty Python & the Holy Grail