Re: Restructuring of Ada (was RE: Ada on Cypress CY7C646 (8051)?)

[Philip Anderson <phil.anderson@amsjv.com>]

Marin David Condic wrote:
<snip> 
> Maybe the answer is to define a language (Call it "Soren" after one of my
> favorite philosophers?) that is effectively a subset of Ada and just not
> expect it to have anything to do with Ada, except for always trailing the
> Ada standard around. If we picked the chapters/verses of the ARM that had no
> unreasonable limitations for small machines as the standard for "Soren" and
> ignored the rest, you'd effectively have a language that could pass through
> any Ada compiler and work, yet could be the subject of specialized compilers
> aimed at small machines.

Replace "small machines" with "safety-related systems" and you'll get
the rationale for SPARK.  It's a subset of Ada, since certain constructs
are not allowed, although extended by annotations in the form of Ada
comments.  So it passes through any Ada compiler, which generates the
required assembly code, but the SPARK rules are checked by SPARK tools.

Of course, it's not quite the same since you need a specialist compiler
to generate the small machine code, but I wonder whether an Ada compiler
generating C as an intermediate level is an answer?


-- 
hwyl/cheers,
Philip Anderson
Alenia Marconi Systems
Cwmbr�n, Cymru/Wales