Re: howto make system calls (newbie question)

[GianLuigi Piacentini <glplps@libero.it>]

"Beard, Frank" wrote:

> I thought Ada was designed to be a general purpose language,
> and among those purposes was strong support for embedded
> systems.
>

rest of post omitted

I rather find that Ada compilers are lacking coverage of  small
microprocessors (PIC, 68HC11, ST11 to name a few).  All what you can find
on them is ASM and C.  Then if you need a companion program on a PC
(perhaps a board tester) the natural choice of  language will be C, simply
because of some 'commonalty of languages'.  So a not-too-clear language
will spread in spite of well-crafted ones.
So more school and universities make courses on  C, abandoning other
languages, on the ground that it is the most frequent languages. So
university libraries will stock only C books (Milan CLUP library: a shelf
of C/C++,  some C#, a few Delphi, 3 Fortran books, no Ada at all). So many
people start coding mess-programs (I recently met a whole family of poorly
coded C), simply because some common book on C do not emphasize enough good
coding practices...
I would like to see things changed, and Ada even on small (well
not-too-much-small)  micros.  Perhaps better and safer programs will
surface, and school managers will choose clearer languages.
Apologizing for my english
G.L. Piacentini