advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[karl bowl]

I would like to ask anybody to tell me about advantages or disadvantages of
ADA(95) over pascal or modula(2).
Many thanks in advance

Nic

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Adrian Knoth]

karl bowl <karl.bowl@gmx.de> wrote:

> I would like to ask anybody to tell me about advantages or disadvantages of
> ADA(95) over pascal or modula(2).

Pascal is mainly for learning purpose. Modula-(3) is a successor of
Pascal, so the properties are similar.

Ada95 (watch the spelling) looks like a Pascal-alike language but is
not the 7th million ugly language from N. Wirth :)

Ada is one of the clearest, most consequent languages at all, it
focusses on readability, portability and security. The last fact
is important. By detecting the maximum of errors at compile-time
running the program is improved right from the beginning. And even
at runtime, a lot of checks guarantee you the right result of
operations, so limiting the amount of surprises.

There was an article about Ada and an Australian satellite some weeks
ago, you should read it. It clearly states why Ada was used, because
there is no possibility to reset the computer in space.

And a common joke in language-discussion is that C++-programmers should
go on debugging while the Ada-programmers have spare time. This is because
if Ada-code compiles it is less buggy than other.

I've done all, Pascal, Ada and Modula. You have a lot limitations in
Pascal. You have identical limitations in Modula, but Modula is better
in some cases than Pascal. At least, the PM3-compiler is bad. I've
found two serious bugs in the P-Modula3-compiler within the first two weeks
of use and several other bugs afterwards. There are even errors in the
documentation, the runtime-environment and, worst, in the implementation
of the language definition.

Ada has a widely discussed language definition and compilers are forced
to it in order to call itself an Ada-compiler. There are some features
that are COULDs, that's for sure.

With Ada95 you have the power of a well-designed modern language with
(parallel-)tasking-capabilities, OOP, security and so on. I guess you
won't miss anything if you're used to Pascal-alike languages.

P.S.: By posting with gmx.de, do you know toh?

-- 
mail: adi@thur.de  	http://adi.thur.de	PGP: v2-key via keyserver

Q: Was passiert, wenn eine deutsche Blondine nach �sterreich auswandert?
A: In beiden L�ndern steigt der durchschnittliche IQ. (aus de.talk.jokes)

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Steve]

"karl bowl" <karl.bowl@gmx.de> wrote in message
news:av4c0m$8a4$06$1@news.t-online.com...
> I would like to ask anybody to tell me about advantages or disadvantages
of
> ADA(95) over pascal or modula(2).

From my experience with Ada 95 and Pascal

Adavantages of Ada 95:
  Ada is one language, Pascal has may dialects.
  Ada includes tasking as a part of the language.
  Ada has stronger typing.
  Ada provides better control over procedure parameter access modes.
  Ada includes modules.
  Ada is more portable than Pascal
  Ada has no equivalent to Pascal's "with" statement (if you've maintained a
lot of Pascal code, you know why this is an advantage).
  Since Ada was mandated by the DOD a continued presence is assured.
  Ada includes machine representation clauses.

Advantages of Pascal
  Pascal includes "Sets" as a part of the language.
  Pascal is more popular (Delphi, Turbo Pascal)

Most of the features (except stronger typing) that are available in Ada are
available in one way or another in various dialects of Pascal.  They are
just not portable and often awkward.

I hope this helps,
Steve
(The Duck)

> Many thanks in advance
>
> Nic
>
>

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Dmitry A. Kazakov]

Steve wrote:

>   Ada has no equivalent to Pascal's "with" statement (if you've maintained
>   a
> lot of Pascal code, you know why this is an advantage).

In fact Ada 95 has an equivalent of Pascal's "with":

X : Some_Type renames An.Extremely.Long.Path.Name.Object;

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
www.dmitry-kazakov.de

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Gautier]

"karl bowl":

> I would like to ask anybody to tell me about advantages or disadvantages of
> ADA(95) over pascal or modula(2).

A few advantages of Ada over Pascal that are not mentioned by Steve

- Ada has a standard library (I/O, maths,...)

- The result of an Ada function can be simply returned where you want;
  in Pascal you must set a pseudo-variable with the same name
  as the function and make your way to the end of the function
  when you have the result (eventually with Goto's!) - it's
  less readable and sub-efficient.

- each composed statement can have more than one statement in it:
  Pascal:
    if cond then
      begin
        st1;
        st2
      end
    else
      begin
        st3;
        st4
      end
  Ada:
    if cond then
      st1;
      st2;
    else
      st3;
      st4;
    end if;

  It is easier, clearer and removes Pascal's ambiguity of
  an "else" for two "if"s.

A few disadvantages of Ada compared to Pascal (rather more typing work):
  - Dispose must be instanciated from Ada.Unchecked_Deallocation
  - some basic functions must be imported from packages:
    * the Ada.Text_IO stuff
    * the Ada.Numerics.Elementary_functions stuff
      (e.g.: x*y, Abs(x), x**2 don't need it, but Sqrt(x) does!)

Generally, you see that Ada has been designed with the cure of Pascal's
weaknesses...

Some discussion on the page below:
__________________________________________________________
Gautier  --  http://www.mysunrise.ch/users/gdm/pascada.htm

NB: For a direct answer, e-mail address on the Web site!

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Alfred Hilscher]

karl bowl schrieb:
> 
> I would like to ask anybody to tell me about advantages or disadvantages of
> ADA(95) over pascal or modula(2).
> Many thanks in advance
> 
> Nic


As an advance I see sometimes the tasking that is part of the language.
It makes development of "multi-threated" applications more easy. I often
use tasks in GUI applications to do the work. This prevents the
application from blocking the desktop.

Compared to Modula-2 I see the following disadvantages:

- No equivalent to the "WITH" from Modula (Adas "with" has a totally
different meaning). This often produces long and bad readable code.

- No construct like Modulas "ARRAY OF BYTE" parameter that catches up
_all_ parameters.

- No _real_ hidden export. You can define types to be "private" in your
spec, but if you want change the definition (let's say from a pointer to
a four byte hash key), you have to change the package spec (= DEFINITION
MODULE) and then recompile _all_ importing modules (although it's only
an internal change to your implementation).

- No equivalent to the "final" from Java. So even if you made your
definition "private" everyone is allowed to declare a child package
which then can access this data.


And mostly the Ada-Compilers generate bigger exe-files than
Modula-compilers do.

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Steve]

"Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote in message
news:av6gr5$cgael$1@ID-77047.news.dfncis.de...
> Steve wrote:
>
> >   Ada has no equivalent to Pascal's "with" statement (if you've
maintained
> >   a
> > lot of Pascal code, you know why this is an advantage).
>
> In fact Ada 95 has an equivalent of Pascal's "with":
>
> X : Some_Type renames An.Extremely.Long.Path.Name.Object;
>

After maintaining both Pascal and Ada code, I wholeheartedly disagree that
Ada's renaming is equivalent to Pascal's with.

If you're trying to analyze Pascal code that looks something like:

  with a, b, c, d do
    begin
       field1 := fieldA
    end;

Tracking down where the !@** field1 and fieldA come from is non trivial.  In
fact if these fields exist in more than one of the a, b, c, d records it may
be compiler dependent.

With Ada's renaming you can easily track a field back to its source.  You
may have to sift through a few renamings, but in practice this is easy to
do.

Side note: I worked on a Pascal to Ada translator that converted with blocks
to declare blocks with renaming.  A few bugs became readily apparent when
the full qualification in the renaming was shown.

Steve
(The Duck)

> --
> Regards,
> Dmitry A. Kazakov
> www.dmitry-kazakov.de

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Ted Dennison]

Alfred Hilscher wrote:
> Compared to Modula-2 I see the following disadvantages:
> 
> - No _real_ hidden export. You can define types to be "private" in your
> spec, but if you want change the definition (let's say from a pointer to
> a four byte hash key), you have to change the package spec (= DEFINITION
> MODULE) and then recompile _all_ importing modules (although it's only
> an internal change to your implementation).


Actually, the difference isn't all that great. To make the type hidden 
in Modula-2, it has to be of a type that can fit in a register (numeric 
or pointer). To get the effect with record types, you have to use a 
pointer as the type in the interface. In Ada you can effect the same 
thing with access types by deferring the definition of the object they 
point to into the package body. All you are missing is the ability to do 
something similar with numeric types. Its not really *that* different.

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Vinzent Hoefler]

"Steve" <nospam_steved94@attbi.com> wrote:

>After maintaining both Pascal and Ada code, I wholeheartedly disagree that
>Ada's renaming is equivalent to Pascal's with.
>
>If you're trying to analyze Pascal code that looks something like:
>
>  with a, b, c, d do
>    begin
>       field1 := fieldA
>    end;

*eeek*

>Tracking down where the !@** field1 and fieldA come from is non trivial.  In
>fact if these fields exist in more than one of the a, b, c, d records it may
>be compiler dependent.

No, AFAIK it should be the last mentioned, because "with a, b, c, d"
is nothing else than saying "with a with b with c with d".

>Side note: I worked on a Pascal to Ada translator that converted with blocks
>to declare blocks with renaming.  A few bugs became readily apparent when
>the full qualification in the renaming was shown.

The code looked like the example above? No wonder.


Vinzent.

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Vinzent Hoefler]

Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com> wrote:

>        I haven't looked at a modula-2 text in some years but as I recall it 
>still had the flaws of Pascal.
[...]
>        if (cond) then
>                statement1;
>        else
>                statement2;

Not in Modula. IIRC, it is more like Ada:

IF cond THEN
  statement1;
ELSE
  statement2;
END;

should be valid Modula. Obviously Wirth learned from his mistakes.
And, BTW, even the code above should spit out a compile-time-error
unless it is a part of some evil nested ifs.


Vinzent.

RE: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Robert C. Leif]

To be fair, Ada should be compared to Wirth's latest creation, Oberon.
Oberon is available as a .NET compiler. While the Ada community has talked
incessantly about writing an operating system, Wirth and Gutknecht did.
Oberon and its operating system are described in Project Oberon,
Addison-Wesley ACM Press ISBN 0-201-54428-8. http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/.
Some of the Oberon software could be translated into Ada.
Bob Leif

-----Original Message-----
From: comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org [mailto:comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org]
On Behalf Of Adrian Knoth
Sent: Friday, January 03, 2003 6:36 PM
To: comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org
Subject: Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

karl bowl <karl.bowl@gmx.de> wrote:

> I would like to ask anybody to tell me about advantages or disadvantages
of
> ADA(95) over pascal or modula(2).

Pascal is mainly for learning purpose. Modula-(3) is a successor of
Pascal, so the properties are similar.

Ada95 (watch the spelling) looks like a Pascal-alike language but is
not the 7th million ugly language from N. Wirth :)

Ada is one of the clearest, most consequent languages at all, it
focusses on readability, portability and security. The last fact
is important. By detecting the maximum of errors at compile-time
running the program is improved right from the beginning. And even
at runtime, a lot of checks guarantee you the right result of
operations, so limiting the amount of surprises.

There was an article about Ada and an Australian satellite some weeks
ago, you should read it. It clearly states why Ada was used, because
there is no possibility to reset the computer in space.

And a common joke in language-discussion is that C++-programmers should
go on debugging while the Ada-programmers have spare time. This is because
if Ada-code compiles it is less buggy than other.

I've done all, Pascal, Ada and Modula. You have a lot limitations in
Pascal. You have identical limitations in Modula, but Modula is better
in some cases than Pascal. At least, the PM3-compiler is bad. I've
found two serious bugs in the P-Modula3-compiler within the first two weeks
of use and several other bugs afterwards. There are even errors in the
documentation, the runtime-environment and, worst, in the implementation
of the language definition.

Ada has a widely discussed language definition and compilers are forced
to it in order to call itself an Ada-compiler. There are some features
that are COULDs, that's for sure.

With Ada95 you have the power of a well-designed modern language with
(parallel-)tasking-capabilities, OOP, security and so on. I guess you
won't miss anything if you're used to Pascal-alike languages.

P.S.: By posting with gmx.de, do you know toh?

-- 
mail: adi@thur.de  	http://adi.thur.de	PGP: v2-key via keyserver

Q: Was passiert, wenn eine deutsche Blondine nach Österreich auswandert?
A: In beiden Ländern steigt der durchschnittliche IQ. (aus de.talk.jokes)

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Ted Dennison]

Robert C. Leif wrote:
> To be fair, Ada should be compared to Wirth's latest creation, Oberon.
> Oberon is available as a .NET compiler. While the Ada community has talked
> incessantly about writing an operating system, Wirth and Gutknecht did.
> Oberon and its operating system are described in Project Oberon,
> Addison-Wesley ACM Press ISBN 0-201-54428-8. http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/.
> Some of the Oberon software could be translated into Ada.


I have the book, and have even used the OS. I don't think its something 
that someone used to a modern OS is going to enjoy. But its nice to see 
people experimenting with the basic UI assumptions we are all accustomed 
to (well..it *was* nice to see back in '95 anyway).

Oberon itself is interesting, but I wouldn't want to write something 
large in it (assuming Ada was available). Wirth's primary obsession when 
writing it was in keeping the language simple. That's a worthy goal, but 
the primary one should be keeping the user's programs simple (and easy 
to understand and easy to debug, etc.). I'd say the two are closely 
related, but are not the same thing.

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[John R. Strohm]

"Ted Dennison" <dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message
news:S9NR9.112846$Y86.81884@news2.central.cox.net...
> Robert C. Leif wrote:
> > To be fair, Ada should be compared to Wirth's latest creation, Oberon.
> > Oberon is available as a .NET compiler. While the Ada community has
talked
> > incessantly about writing an operating system, Wirth and Gutknecht did.
> > Oberon and its operating system are described in Project Oberon,
> > Addison-Wesley ACM Press ISBN 0-201-54428-8. http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/.
> > Some of the Oberon software could be translated into Ada.
>
>
> I have the book, and have even used the OS. I don't think its something
> that someone used to a modern OS is going to enjoy. But its nice to see
> people experimenting with the basic UI assumptions we are all accustomed
> to (well..it *was* nice to see back in '95 anyway).

Actually, Oberon came out in '90 or '91.  I bought Reiser's book on the
system in 1991 while I was on a temporary field gig in Colorado Springs.

> Oberon itself is interesting, but I wouldn't want to write something
> large in it (assuming Ada was available). Wirth's primary obsession when
> writing it was in keeping the language simple. That's a worthy goal, but
> the primary one should be keeping the user's programs simple (and easy
> to understand and easy to debug, etc.). I'd say the two are closely
> related, but are not the same thing.

Actually, Oberon started as an operating system project.  Wirth and
Gutknecht took a sabbatical, and got royally ticked off at the quality (lack
thereof) of workstation Unix.  Shortly after they got home, Wirth got tapped
to teach the systems programming class, an area in which he had very little
knowledge.  So, they needed a project to get experience, and Wirth has long
followed the Computer Science tradition of ending the sentence "There has to
be a better way..." with "... and I will build it myself."

What makes Oberon interesting is that it did in a few hundred kilobytes what
everyone else needed multiple megabytes to do.

It also made one very definite point, and the operating system manual
brought this out very clearly: text is text is text.  If you can see text on
the screen, you can grab it, copy it, paste it, hand it of to the "shell" as
a command, use it as an argument, edit it in place, or WHATEVER.  Speaking
as a user, of Oberon and a bunch of other things, this is a MAJOR
improvement over just about everything else in the world, both before and
since.

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[John R. Strohm]

"AG" <ang@xtra.co.nz> wrote in message
news:joSR9.11275$F63.197247@news.xtra.co.nz...
> > > > Addison-Wesley ACM Press ISBN 0-201-54428-8.
> http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/.
>
> Just a quick question and maybe a warning [?]
>
> Clicking on that link resulted in a flurry of activity
> from Zone Alarm Pro on my machine (it's been
> more or less quiet for some months now).
>
> Checking  the logs turned up things like
> "Generic Host ..." but also specific blocked
> destinations called    "dump.inf.ethz.ch"
>
> Matched with the link above that doesn't
> look too good. Any comments?

Beats me.  That is the official Oberon site at ETH-Zurich in Switzerland.

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[karl bowl]

"Alfred Hilscher" <Alfred.Hilscher@t-online.de> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:3E171612.E4E2972@t-online.de...
>
>
> Compared to Modula-2 I see the following disadvantages:
>
> - No equivalent to the "WITH" from Modula (Adas "with" has a totally
> different meaning). This often produces long and bad readable code.
>
> - No construct like Modulas "ARRAY OF BYTE" parameter that catches up
> _all_ parameters.
>
> - No _real_ hidden export. You can define types to be "private" in your
> spec, but if you want change the definition (let's say from a pointer to
> a four byte hash key), you have to change the package spec (= DEFINITION
> MODULE) and then recompile _all_ importing modules (although it's only
> an internal change to your implementation).
>
> - No equivalent to the "final" from Java. So even if you made your
> definition "private" everyone is allowed to declare a child package
> which then can access this data.
>
>
> And mostly the Ada-Compilers generate bigger exe-files than
> Modula-compilers do.

Assume you have to design an embedded sytem, for instance a
movementcontroller for a vehicle. In this way you have to decide for a
programming language. Would you prefer Modula2 or Ada95 or anything else?

Nic

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Gautier]

Alfred Hilscher:

> Compared to Modula-2 I see the following disadvantages:

Now some advantages of Ada:

- usable modularity (thank to "use"). In Modula-2 you have to
  write things like "FROM Math IMPORT Cos, Sin, ...."
  "FROM IO IMPORT WriteLn, ReadLn, ..." if you don't want to
  prefix everything.

- a standard library. In Modula-2 it is the empty set.
  OK, there are more or less comparable Text_IO (IO)
  but some compilers have "WRITE", others "Write"...
  since M2 is case-sensitive, you reach the zero-portability
  level. Even the common denominator of all BASIC's provide
  more...

- available compilers

About the big size of executables, there are other Ada compilers
than GNAT (with smart linking for instance).
________________________________________________________
Gautier  --  http://www.mysunrise.ch/users/gdm/gsoft.htm

NB: For a direct answer, e-mail address on the Web site!

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Dmitry A. Kazakov]

Steve wrote:

> "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote in message
> news:av6gr5$cgael$1@ID-77047.news.dfncis.de...
>> Steve wrote:
>>
>> >   Ada has no equivalent to Pascal's "with" statement (if you've
> maintained
>> >   a
>> > lot of Pascal code, you know why this is an advantage).
>>
>> In fact Ada 95 has an equivalent of Pascal's "with":
>>
>> X : Some_Type renames An.Extremely.Long.Path.Name.Object;
> 
> After maintaining both Pascal and Ada code, I wholeheartedly disagree that
> Ada's renaming is equivalent to Pascal's with.
> 
> If you're trying to analyze Pascal code that looks something like:
> 
>   with a, b, c, d do
>     begin
>        field1 := fieldA
>     end;
> 
> Tracking down where the !@** field1 and fieldA come from is non trivial. 
> In fact if these fields exist in more than one of the a, b, c, d records
> it may be compiler dependent.
> 
> With Ada's renaming you can easily track a field back to its source.  You
> may have to sift through a few renamings, but in practice this is easy to
> do.

I agree that Ada's "rename" is better than Pascal's "with". However they 
both are responses to same problem. And neither is ideal. For example, 
people often write something like:

with Ada.IO_Exceptions;
package My_IO is
   End_Error : exception renames Ada.IO_Exception.End_Error;

and run into troubles when both Ada.IO_Exceptions and My_IO are "used". This 
causes some people to believe that "use" is inherently bad, which is not 
true.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
www.dmitry-kazakov.de

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Alfred Hilscher]

karl bowl schrieb:
> 

> 
> Assume you have to design an embedded sytem, for instance a
> movementcontroller for a vehicle. In this way you have to decide for a
> programming language. Would you prefer Modula2 or Ada95 or anything else?
> 
> Nic

Personally I would prefer Modula-2 but I would also be happy to use Ada.
But - all companies I know, would force me to use C instead (at least
here in Germany).

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Alfred Hilscher]

Gautier schrieb:
> 
> Alfred Hilscher:
> 
> > Compared to Modula-2 I see the following disadvantages:
> 
> Now some advantages of Ada:
> 
> - usable modularity (thank to "use"). In Modula-2 you have to
>   write things like "FROM Math IMPORT Cos, Sin, ...."
>   "FROM IO IMPORT WriteLn, ReadLn, ..." if you don't want to
>   prefix everything.

Or you write FROM Math IMPORT ALL;

> - a standard library. In Modula-2 it is the empty set.
>   OK, there are more or less comparable Text_IO (IO)
>   but some compilers have "WRITE", others "Write"...
>   since M2 is case-sensitive, you reach the zero-portability
>   level. Even the common denominator of all BASIC's provide
>   more...
 
Ok, Modula has less then Ada. But - Ada has less than C, C++ or Java.

> - available compilers
> 
> About the big size of executables, there are other Ada compilers
> than GNAT (with smart linking for instance).

Well, I work with Aonix special edition sometimes, but if you do not use
the shared library then the exe file size is still bigger than that from
Modula.

> ________________________________________________________
> Gautier  --  http://www.mysunrise.ch/users/gdm/gsoft.htm
> 
> NB: For a direct answer, e-mail address on the Web site!

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Vinzent Hoefler]

Alfred Hilscher <Alfred.Hilscher@t-online.de> wrote:

>But - all companies I know, would force me to use C instead (at least
>here in Germany).

The EADS uses Ada and I am not sure, but I think, a lot of the ICE
related software is written in Ada, too.


Vinzent.

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Alfred Hilscher]

Vinzent Hoefler schrieb:
> 
> Alfred Hilscher <Alfred.Hilscher@t-online.de> wrote:
> 
> >But - all companies I know, would force me to use C instead (at least
> >here in Germany).
> 
> The EADS uses Ada and I am not sure, but I think, a lot of the ICE
> related software is written in Ada, too.
> 
> Vinzent.

Hi Vinzent,

the EADS is moving away from Ada. They are looking mostly only for Ada
maintainers, but new sw is often written in C, C++ or Java. You can
verify this by either asking for a  (Ada-)job, or by looking at the job
offers (at job.de, monster.de etc).

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Vinzent Hoefler]

Alfred Hilscher <Alfred.Hilscher@t-online.de> wrote:

>the EADS is moving away from Ada. They are looking mostly only for Ada
>maintainers, but new sw is often written in C, C++ or Java. You can
>verify this by either asking for a  (Ada-)job, or by looking at the job
>offers (at job.de, monster.de etc).

The last two offers from jobpilot:

2002/01/03:
http://www.jobpilot.ch/misc/adframe/jobpilot/7d2/20/811058.htm

2002/12/16:
http://www.jobpilot.ch/misc/adframe/jobpilot/7d2/27/826985.htm

Both sound like Ada to me.


Vinzent.

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Alfred Hilscher]

Vinzent Hoefler schrieb:
> 
> Alfred Hilscher <Alfred.Hilscher@t-online.de> wrote:
> 
> >the EADS is moving away from Ada. They are looking mostly only for Ada
> >maintainers, but new sw is often written in C, C++ or Java. You can
> >verify this by either asking for a  (Ada-)job, or by looking at the job
> >offers (at job.de, monster.de etc).
> 
> The last two offers from jobpilot:
> 
> 2002/01/03:
> http://www.jobpilot.ch/misc/adframe/jobpilot/7d2/20/811058.htm
> 
> 2002/12/16:
> http://www.jobpilot.ch/misc/adframe/jobpilot/7d2/27/826985.htm
> 
> Both sound like Ada to me.
> 
> Vinzent.

Du schummelst, Du hast jobpilot.ch (statt .de) benutzt.

Have a look at:

http://www.job.de/misc/adframe/jobpilot/7d2/20/811589.htm

http://www.job.de/misc/adframe/jobpilot/7d2/11/773566.htm

or try monster.de

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Vinzent Hoefler]

Alfred Hilscher <Alfred.Hilscher@t-online.de> wrote:

>Vinzent Hoefler schrieb:
>> 
>> Alfred Hilscher <Alfred.Hilscher@t-online.de> wrote:
>> 
>> >the EADS is moving away from Ada.
>>[...]
>>
>> The last two offers from jobpilot:
>> 
>> 2002/01/03:
>> http://www.jobpilot.ch/misc/adframe/jobpilot/7d2/20/811058.htm
>> 
>> 2002/12/16:
>> http://www.jobpilot.ch/misc/adframe/jobpilot/7d2/27/826985.htm
>
>Du schummelst,

No, I'm not cheating. :-)

>Du hast jobpilot.ch (statt .de) benutzt.

Sure, that's because usually I'm living there. ;-) But I bet,
replacing .ch with .de in the links above would give the same results.

>Have a look at:
>
>http://www.job.de/misc/adframe/jobpilot/7d2/20/811589.htm

Yes, this sounds like they are moving to Java here.

>http://www.job.de/misc/adframe/jobpilot/7d2/11/773566.htm

Look at the design. They want a GUI to some Database-Application or
such. I didn't say, they use Ada as the *only* language.


Vinzent.

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[tmoran]

> > About the big size of executables, there are other Ada compilers
> > than GNAT (with smart linking for instance).
>
> Well, I work with Aonix special edition sometimes, but if you do not use
  There are extreme differences in executable sizes for different
compilers.  Presumably it's mostly dependent on smart linking, run-time
packaging, and debugging info.

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Vinzent Hoefler]

Vinzent Hoefler <JeLlyFish.software@gmx.net> wrote:

>2002/01/03:

2003-01-03, of course.


Vinzent.

advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula or oberon was RE: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Robert C. Leif]

The site is at the Computer Systems Institute at the Swiss Federal Institute
of Technology. It opened for me. The following may be of interest.
http://www.bluebottle.ethz.ch/oberon.net/
http://www.bluebottle.ethz.ch/oberon.net/projectGoals.html
The Oberon.NET site has a set of goals:
Our idealistic goal in the Oberon for .NET project was the design of an
interoperable, imperative object-oriented language that is simpler, more
economical, more powerful and better scalable than comparable programming
languages. More specifically, our goal was a language that: 

Preserves the spirit of Oberon. 
Disentangles different concerns like code reuse, polymorphism, sub-classing
etc. 
Emphasizes the view of software development as implementation of predefined
abstractions. 
Unifies the logical structure of programs and distributed systems. 
Is able to interoperate with other participating languages both as a
consumer and as a producer. 
Maps naturally to the .net framework
I believe that these could be met by SPARK or the equivalent.
http://www.bluebottle.ethz.ch/oberon.net/ActiveOberonNetWhitePaper.pdf
is a description of the language. It would be well worthwhile for the Ada
language architects to read this. Oberon blows away Java.
Bob Leif

-----Original Message-----
From: comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org [mailto:comp.lang.ada-admin@ada.eu.org]
On Behalf Of John R. Strohm
Sent: Sunday, January 05, 2003 1:38 AM
To: comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org
Subject: Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

"AG" <ang@xtra.co.nz> wrote in message
news:joSR9.11275$F63.197247@news.xtra.co.nz...
> > > > Addison-Wesley ACM Press ISBN 0-201-54428-8.
> http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/.
>
> Just a quick question and maybe a warning [?]
>
> Clicking on that link resulted in a flurry of activity
> from Zone Alarm Pro on my machine (it's been
> more or less quiet for some months now).
>
> Checking  the logs turned up things like
> "Generic Host ..." but also specific blocked
> destinations called    "dump.inf.ethz.ch"
>
> Matched with the link above that doesn't
> look too good. Any comments?

Beats me.  That is the official Oberon site at ETH-Zurich in Switzerland.

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[AG]

"John R. Strohm" <strohm@airmail.net> wrote in message
news:A1683CDD2DB5772A.D80CCB7D47AFFF44.D8475447C984F2F9@lp.airnews.net...
> "Ted Dennison" <dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message
> news:S9NR9.112846$Y86.81884@news2.central.cox.net...
> > Robert C. Leif wrote:

> > > Addison-Wesley ACM Press ISBN 0-201-54428-8.
http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/.

Just a quick question and maybe a warning [?]

Clicking on that link resulted in a flurry of activity
from Zone Alarm Pro on my machine (it's been
more or less quiet for some months now).

Checking  the logs turned up things like
"Generic Host ..." but also specific blocked
destinations called    "dump.inf.ethz.ch"

Matched with the link above that doesn't
look too good. Any comments?

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Gautier]

[jobs, EADS, Ada or not]

A good way is to work in an area where no or few programming
is required, so you can develop and spread your tools programmed
in your favourite language...
________________________________________________________
Gautier  --  http://www.mysunrise.ch/users/gdm/gsoft.htm

NB: For a direct answer, e-mail address on the Web site!

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Alfred Hilscher]

Gautier schrieb:
> 
> [jobs, EADS, Ada or not]
> 
> A good way is to work in an area where no or few programming
> is required, so you can develop and spread your tools programmed
> in your favourite language...
> ________________________________________________________
> Gautier  --  http://www.mysunrise.ch/users/gdm/gsoft.htm
> 
> NB: For a direct answer, e-mail address on the Web site!

A better way is not to work anything. Only one problem - where get the
money to life?

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Randy Brukardt]

tmoran@acm.org wrote in message <0k2S9.253946$qF3.23112@sccrnsc04>...
>> > About the big size of executables, there are other Ada compilers
>> > than GNAT (with smart linking for instance).
>>
>> Well, I work with Aonix special edition sometimes, but if you do not
use
>  There are extreme differences in executable sizes for different
>compilers.  Presumably it's mostly dependent on smart linking, run-time
>packaging, and debugging info.

For Claw programs, there is an order of magnitude difference between the
best and worst compilers for code size. Our compiler (Janus/Ada) is by
far the best. We don't generally advertise this fact for two reasons:
   -- We haven't studied the other compilers closely enough to know
whether we're using the best possible switches. Our purpose is testing,
not size benchmarks.
   -- When I've made local generated code comparisons, other compilers
often do better. So I'm not willing to say much about our code quality.

The empty program on Windows makes an 29K .EXE file, the majority of
that is Windows overhead (the actual code size is about 13500 bytes plus
a little over 1K for data). The runtime can be recompiled without
exception walkback support, which would save another 1.5K.

                   Randy Brukardt

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[karl bowl]

"Alfred Hilscher" <Alfred.Hilscher@t-online.de> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:3E189DAF.9A908990@t-online.de...

> the EADS is moving away from Ada. They are looking mostly only for Ada
> maintainers, but new sw is often written in C, C++ or Java.



What do you think about the reasons for this break with ada?  EADS develops
safety critical software, so I think Ada is more adventageous than C, C++ or
Java.

Nic

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Alfred Hilscher]

Randy Brukardt schrieb:
> 
> The empty program on Windows makes an 29K .EXE file, the majority of
> that is Windows overhead (the actual code size is about 13500 bytes plus
> a little over 1K for data). The runtime can be recompiled without
> exception walkback support, which would save another 1.5K.
> 
>                    Randy Brukardt

This sounds good. But - how expensive is the compiler? Would it be a
choise for a hobbyist, or is it far beyond? I asked for Green Hills some
time, and I was shocked about the price.

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Martin Klaiber]

karl bowl <karl.bowl@gmx.de> wrote:

> I would like to ask anybody to tell me about advantages or
> disadvantages of ADA(95) over pascal or modula(2).

I'm only an Ada-beginner, but I'd say that Ada is so much more powerful
than Pascal that they hardly can be compared at all. But I also found
three things which I miss in Ada compared to Borland Pascal.

First, it would be nice, if an object in Ada would know it's own
variables without naming them explicitly.

  type type_Object is
    tagged record
      A_Variable : A_type;
    end record;
  procedure Add (Objectname : type_Object);

  -- body:
  
  Add (Objectname : type_Object) is
  begin
    A_Variable := A_Variable + A_Value;
  end Add;
  
instead of:

  Add (Objectname : type_Object) is
  begin
    Objectname.A_Variable := Objectname.A_Variable + A_Value;
  end Add;
  
It's not a big thing, but sometimes it leads to a lot of writing. Yes,
I know I can rename variables, but I still wonder why an object in Ada
doesn't know it's own variables.

Second, it would be nice, if Ada would allow to change internal
variables of an object also in functions. So, the following is not
valid code but it would be nice if it was, IMHO.

  type type_Calendar is
    tagged record
      Month : type_Month;
      Year : type_Year;
    end record;
  function IncMonth (Calendar : in out type_Calendar) return boolean;
  function IncYear (Calendar : in out type_Calendar) return boolean;
  
  -- body:
  
  function IncMonth (Calendar : in out type_Calendar) return boolean is
    ret_val : boolean := true;
  begin
    if Calendar.Month = 12 then
      if IncYear (Calendar) = true then
        Calendar.Month := 1;
      else
        ret_val := false;
      end if;
    else
      Calendar.Month := Calendar.Month + 1;
    end if;
    return ret_val;
  end IncMonth;
  
  function IncYear (Calendar : in out type_Calendar) return boolean is
  begin
    if Calendar.Year < 3000 then
      Calendar.Year := Calendar.Year + 1;
      return true;
    else
      return false;
    end if;
  end IncYear;
  
Of course the same thing can be done with procedures and a boolean
parameter. But IMHO it's less elegant and less intuitive. I already
had a discussion about that, and people told me that the above is
forbidden to avoid side-effects. But I don't see any side-effect
here. The functions and the variables to be changed belong to the
same object, and to my opinion it would not be dangerous to allow
also functions to change these variables.

This is at least my view as a human. Internally these variables
might be represented as anything else. But to me one of the main
qualities of oo-code is the community of variables and the functions
and procedures to work on these variables. So, I just find it a bit
strange that something like above is not allowed.

The third thing I miss in Ada is something like the 'inherited'
statement in BP. If you have code like this:

  type type_Printer is
    tagged record
      ...
    end record;
  procedure Initialize (Printer : type_Printer);
  
  type type_Inkjet_Printer is new type_Printer with
    record
      ...
    end record;
  procedure Initialize (Inkjet_Printer : type_Inkjet_Printer);
  
  -- body
  
  procedure Initialize (Inkjet_Printer : type_Inkjet_Printer) is
  begin
    Initialize (type_Printer (Inkjet_Printer));
    ...
  end Initialze;

and later change the object structure to:

  type type_Printer is
    tagged record
      ...
    end record;
  procedure Initialize (Printer : type_Printer);
  
  type type_Line_Printer is new type_Printer with
    record
      ...
    end record;
  procedure Initialize (Line_Printer : type_Line_Printer);
  
  type type_Inkjet_Printer is new type_Line_Printer with
    record
      ...
    end record;
  procedure Initialize (Inkjet_Printer : type_Inkjet_Printer);
  
the compiler doesn't (cannot) realize in the Initialize-procedure above
that Inkjet_Printer is now calling a wrong Initialize-procedure itself
(the one from type_Printer, instead of the one from type_Line_Printer).
It already took me hours to find such errors. With such an inherited
keyword we could write instead

  procedure Initialize (Inkjet_Printer : type_Inkjet_Printer) is
  begin
    Initialize (inherited (Inkjet_Printer));
    ...
  end Initialze;

and would always call the Initialize-procedure of the type the object
is inherited from. Of course this does not avoid all errors as someone
might really want to use a procedure from a further type. But I suggest
this person would use the name of this procedure anyway.

Well, instead of the inherited-statement, it would also be helpful, if
the compiler would give a warning in such cases.

Martin

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Randy Brukardt]

Alfred Hilscher wrote in message <3E1AE897.BDAA5A9C@t-online.de>...
>
>
>Randy Brukardt schrieb:
>>
>> The empty program on Windows makes an 29K .EXE file, the majority of
>> that is Windows overhead (the actual code size is about 13500 bytes
plus
>> a little over 1K for data). The runtime can be recompiled without
>> exception walkback support, which would save another 1.5K.
>>
>>                    Randy Brukardt
>
>This sounds good. But - how expensive is the compiler? Would it be a
>choise for a hobbyist, or is it far beyond? I asked for Green Hills
some
>time, and I was shocked about the price.

The Janus/Ada Personal Edition starts at $195 for Windows. The Combo
(which includes Claw) is $295. Probably we should charge more, but our
root are as hobbyists ourselves (in the days before Open Source).

For all of the prices on RR Software's Ada products, look at:
    http://www.rrsoftware.com/html/companyinf/prices.htm

                  Randy Brukardt

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Gautier]

Martin Klaiber:

> I'm only an Ada-beginner, but I'd say that Ada is so much more powerful
> than Pascal that they hardly can be compared at all. But I also found
> three things which I miss in Ada compared to Borland Pascal.
> 
> First, it would be nice, if an object in Ada would know it's own
> variables without naming them explicitly.
...
> It's not a big thing, but sometimes it leads to a lot of writing. Yes,
> I know I can rename variables, but I still wonder why an object in Ada
> doesn't know it's own variables.

In fact, you are missing BP's prefixed OO notation (object.Method).
You will certainly find fierce debates in c.l.a archives about it.
I survive by using always "o" as the object parameter.
The explicit has maybe the merit of readability over concision
(analogous to Pascal's "with" and its absence in Ada).

> Second, it would be nice, if Ada would allow to change internal
> variables of an object also in functions. So, the following is not
> valid code but it would be nice if it was, IMHO.

>   function IncMonth (Calendar : in out type_Calendar) return boolean;
>   function IncYear (Calendar : in out type_Calendar) return boolean;

> Of course the same thing can be done with procedures and a boolean
> parameter. But IMHO it's less elegant and less intuitive. [...]

Also subject to debates... you say it's intuitive because you are
accustomed to it. But look at your example. Normally, the basic role
of a function is to give a value in function of other (the parameters).
In your case the main information is what you do to "Calendar" and
the result has a minor role - quite strange... It would be more
elegant and intuitive (and also efficient) to write

  procedure IncMonth (Calendar : in out type_Calendar) is
  begin
    if Calendar.Month = 12 then
      IncYear (Calendar);
      Calendar.Month := 1;
    else
      Calendar.Month := Calendar.Month + 1;
    end if;
  end IncMonth;

  procedure function IncYear (Calendar : in out type_Calendar) is
  begin
    if Calendar.Year < 3000 then
      Calendar.Year := Calendar.Year + 1;
    else
      raise Year_out_of_range;
    end if;
  end IncYear;

Don't forget, you have the exceptions... it saves a lot of transporting
error codes and acrobatic expressions...
________________________________________________________
Gautier  --  http://www.mysunrise.ch/users/gdm/gsoft.htm

NB: For a direct answer, e-mail address on the Web site!

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Alfred Hilscher]

Randy Brukardt schrieb:
> For all of the prices on RR Software's Ada products, look at:
>     http://www.rrsoftware.com/html/companyinf/prices.htm
> 
>                   Randy Brukardt

Thanks.

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Martin Klaiber]

Gautier <gautier_niouzes@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Martin Klaiber:

>> First, it would be nice, if an object in Ada would know it's own
>> variables without naming them explicitly.

> In fact, you are missing BP's prefixed OO notation (object.Method).
> You will certainly find fierce debates in c.l.a archives about it.

Yes, I've read some of these debates. I don't prefer one notation over
the other. Both have their advantages and disadvantages IMHO.

> The explicit has maybe the merit of readability over concision

Hm, depends on. Redundancy can affect readability too.

>> Second, it would be nice, if Ada would allow to change internal
>> variables of an object also in functions.

> Also subject to debates... you say it's intuitive because you are
> accustomed to it. 

Yes, that might be true.

> But look at your example. Normally, the basic role of a function is to
> give a value in function of other (the parameters).

Here the parameter is in the function-name. I could have written it
also as (skipped a bit to keep the line short):

  function IncMonth (Calender : ...; Days : Positive) return boolean;

> In your case the main information is what you do to "Calendar" and the
> result has a minor role - quite strange...

Well, this depends on how you want to use such functions. I like to use
them like that:

  if IncMonth (Calendar) = true then
    Update (Anything);
  end if;

> It would be more elegant and intuitive (and also efficient) to write

>  procedure IncMonth (Calendar : in out type_Calendar) is
>  begin
>    if Calendar.Month = 12 then
>      IncYear (Calendar);
>      Calendar.Month := 1;
>    else
>      Calendar.Month := Calendar.Month + 1;
>    end if;
>  end IncMonth;

>  procedure function IncYear (Calendar : in out type_Calendar) is
>  begin
>    if Calendar.Year < 3000 then
>      Calendar.Year := Calendar.Year + 1;
>    else
>      raise Year_out_of_range;
>    end if;
>  end IncYear;

Will this really work like that? Calendar.Month must not be set to 1
if IncYear fails. Does this mean, if exception Year_out_of_range is
raised, the rest of the code in IncMonth will be skipped?

> Don't forget, you have the exceptions... it saves a lot of transporting
> error codes and acrobatic expressions...

Yes, these exceptions are phantastic. I really have to get used to them.

Martin

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Gautier]

Martin Klaiber:

> Will this really work like that? Calendar.Month must not be set to 1
> if IncYear fails. Does this mean, if exception Year_out_of_range is
> raised, the rest of the code in IncMonth will be skipped?

It will. Nothing is worth a little test:
--8<-----8<-----8<-----8<-----8<-----8<-----8<---
with Ada.Text_IO; use Ada.Text_IO;

procedure test_exception is

  subtype type_Month is Natural;
  subtype type_Year is Natural;

  type type_Calendar is tagged record
    Month : type_Month;
    Year : type_Year;
  end record; 

  Year_out_of_range: exception;

  procedure IncYear (Calendar : in out type_Calendar) is
  begin
    if Calendar.Year < 3000 then
      Calendar.Year := Calendar.Year + 1;
    else
      raise Year_out_of_range;
    end if;
  end IncYear;

  procedure IncMonth (Calendar : in out type_Calendar) is
  begin
    if Calendar.Month = 12 then
      IncYear (Calendar);
      Put_Line("[ Trace point 1 ]");
      Calendar.Month := 1;
    else
      Calendar.Month := Calendar.Month + 1;
      Put_Line("[ Trace point 2 ]");
    end if;
  end IncMonth;

  procedure Test( c: type_Calendar ) is
    cobbaye: type_Calendar:= c;
  begin
    IncMonth( cobbaye );
  exception
    when Year_out_of_range => Put("Kaboom - too far in the future");
  end;

begin
  Test((12,2000));
  Test((11,3000));
  Test((12,3000));
end;
--8<-----8<-----8<-----8<-----8<-----8<-----8<---
Output is as expected
[ Trace point 1 ]
[ Trace point 2 ]
Kaboom - too far in the future
________________________________________________________
Gautier  --  http://www.mysunrise.ch/users/gdm/gsoft.htm

NB: For a direct answer, e-mail address on the Web site!

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Martin Klaiber]

Gautier <gautier_niouzes@hotmail.com> wrote:

> It will. Nothing is worth a little test:

You're right, I should have tested this by myself.

> Output is as expected
> [ Trace point 1 ]
> [ Trace point 2 ]
> Kaboom - too far in the future

Thanks for this example. These exceptions are really great. I will
try to use them more often.

Martin

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Richard Riehle]

karl bowl wrote:

> I would like to ask anybody to tell me about advantages or disadvantages of
> ADA(95) over pascal or modula(2).
> Many thanks in advance

Pascal and Modula-2 have rather poor support for inheritance and programming
for extensibility.   Neither come close to Ada's support for concurrency and
real-time programming.   Modula-2 requires one to use opaque types and this
is sometimes a Pain.   Also, Modula-2 has case sensitive reserved words and
that drives me crazy after a very short time of using it.

Modula-3 also has case sensitive reserved words, but it is, in some respects
a great improvement over Modula-2.    I particularly like the safe mode
features of the language.    One obscure little issue with Modula-3 is,
unlike Modula-2, that types with different names can be used interchangeably
if they are structurally equivalence.   I don't like structural type
equivalence
in C, C++, or Modula-3.   I don't trust type promotion either, but at least one

is not plagued by that in Modula-3.

Overall, Modula-3 is a pretty good language design.  I still prefer Ada, but
Modula-3 could be a good choice for a wide range of projects, especially
with its safe mode feature.

Richard Riehle

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Alfred Hilscher]

karl bowl schrieb:
> Assume you have to design an embedded sytem, for instance a
> movementcontroller for a vehicle. In this way you have to decide for a
> programming language. Would you prefer Modula2 or Ada95 or anything else?
> 
> Nic


I have a question to you, too.

Assume you have to program a brake control for car, would you do it in
Ada? Then I would like to know which tools you use. The systems I know
are based on microcontrollers HC11/HC12 or 8051. _I_ don't know any
Ada-compiler for these chips. While there are a lot of C develop
environments, there are only very few for Modula, and none for Ada.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.

The next point is: C systems are cheap and even free available.  Modula
systems are expensive. But - Ada prices are far beyond from good and
bad. Have you ever heard the prices from Green Hills for example? A
small company with five to ten people can not buy it. And what I've
heard about ACT-prices, they seem not be suitable, too. Embedded systems
in non military environment have not some k-dollars available for
sw-tools.

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Larry Kilgallen]

In article <3E296128.4183B70A@t-online.de>, Alfred Hilscher <Alfred.Hilscher@t-online.de> writes:

> Assume you have to program a brake control for car, would you do it in
> Ada? Then I would like to know which tools you use. The systems I know
> are based on microcontrollers HC11/HC12 or 8051. _I_ don't know any
> Ada-compiler for these chips. While there are a lot of C develop
> environments, there are only very few for Modula, and none for Ada.
> Please correct me if I'm wrong.

The SofCheck AdaMagic compiler is available in a form that uses ANSI C
as an intermediate language.   Thus any target machine for which you
have an ANSI C compiler can be programmed using Ada.  Using this method
one automatically takes advantage of whatever peephole optimization the
hardware-specific C compiler provides.

	http://www.sofcheck.com

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[John R. Strohm]

"Alfred Hilscher" <Alfred.Hilscher@t-online.de> wrote in message
news:3E296128.4183B70A@t-online.de...
>
>
> karl bowl schrieb:
> > Assume you have to design an embedded sytem, for instance a
> > movementcontroller for a vehicle. In this way you have to decide for a
> > programming language. Would you prefer Modula2 or Ada95 or anything
else?
> >
> > Nic
>
>
> I have a question to you, too.
>
> Assume you have to program a brake control for car, would you do it in
> Ada? Then I would like to know which tools you use. The systems I know
> are based on microcontrollers HC11/HC12 or 8051. _I_ don't know any
> Ada-compiler for these chips. While there are a lot of C develop
> environments, there are only very few for Modula, and none for Ada.
> Please correct me if I'm wrong.
>
> The next point is: C systems are cheap and even free available.  Modula
> systems are expensive. But - Ada prices are far beyond from good and
> bad. Have you ever heard the prices from Green Hills for example? A
> small company with five to ten people can not buy it. And what I've
> heard about ACT-prices, they seem not be suitable, too. Embedded systems
> in non military environment have not some k-dollars available for
> sw-tools.

Have you ever been exposed to basic engineering economics?

In the United States, with all overhead considered, a good engineer costs
his employer on the rough order of $250,000 per year.  I would be very
surprised if the price was that much different in Germany.  When you are
talking about spending that kind of money on software engineers, trying to
pinch pennies on their tools is idiocy.  What you want is tools that will
improve their productivity, that will let them get more work done per year.

Recall that Pratt & Whitney documented 2x productivity improvement using
Ada.  2x productivity improvement, when an engineer costs $250,000/year,
means that an Ada toolset that costs $250,000 per engineer PAYS FOR ITSELF
IN ONE YEAR.  If two engineers use that toolset, and they both get 2x
productivity improvement, the toolset PAYS FOR ITSELF IN SIX MONTHS.

With ten engineers using the toolset, and only a 10% improvement in
productivity, that $250,000 toolset STILL pays for itself in a year.

This, incidentally, is a significant part of the reason why Symbolics LISP
machines, single-user workstations with high five-digit pricetags, sold
faster than beer at Wurstfest parties.  They paid for themselves in months,
at a time when fully-burdened engineers cost about $100,000 per year.

AND FURTHERMORE.

When you are talking specifically about brake controls for cars, you have to
recognize a few things.  First, you are talking about a safety-critical
system.  Anything less than the absolute best NO-FAIL quality is
unacceptable, because people will get killed AND THEIR SURVIVING RELATIVES
WILL SUE YOUR COMPANY OUT OF EXISTENCE.  Worse, if they can find the
registered professional engineer who signed off on the brake control
software, HE WILL GO TO PRISON for involuntary manslaughter.  The accepted
standard in the United States, last I heard, was around $70,000 per injury
and $300,000 per death.  Second, you are going to amortize your development
costs over hundreds of thousands of cars, so a toolset that costs $100,000
winds up costing PENNIES per car.  Third, when those cars start rolling off
the assembly line, if your brake controls are not ready, it will cost the
car manufacturer a small fortune EVERY DAY your controls are late.

In other words, trying to save a few pennies on software development
toolsets is sheer idiocy.

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Vinzent Hoefler]

"John R. Strohm" <strohm@airmail.net> wrote:

>In other words, trying to save a few pennies on software development
>toolsets is sheer idiocy.

ACK. But you forgot the usual manager thinking.


Vinzent.

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Larry Kilgallen]

In article <b0cil5$nrsvj$1@ID-175126.news.dfncis.de>, Vinzent Hoefler <JeLlyFish.software@gmx.net> writes:
> "John R. Strohm" <strohm@airmail.net> wrote:
> 
>>In other words, trying to save a few pennies on software development
>>toolsets is sheer idiocy.
> 
> ACK. But you forgot the usual manager thinking.

Point out that if the registered engineer indicates recommending
something better, the manager will be the next legal target.

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[John R. Strohm]

"Vinzent Hoefler" <JeLlyFish.software@gmx.net> wrote in message
news:b0cil5$nrsvj$1@ID-175126.news.dfncis.de...
> "John R. Strohm" <strohm@airmail.net> wrote:
>
> >In other words, trying to save a few pennies on software development
> >toolsets is sheer idiocy.
>
> ACK. But you forgot the usual manager thinking.

No, I didn't.  Instead, I explain the usual manager thinking, and the way
the software engineer must couch the argument so as to work WITHIN the usual
manager thinking.

Let me give you an example.  A buddy of mine once did a contract gig at
GM-Delco, several years ago.  The project was embedded software for a
heads-down display for the new Cadillac.

He noticed something interesting.  When an engineer told his manager that he
needed a certain piece of test equipment, it showed up in the lab, the next
day, powered up and ready to go.  When he said he needed prototype hardware
for debugging, a wire-wrapped prototype showed up in a couple of days, and a
printed circuit board showed up a few days later.

He inquired, and management explained.  In eighteen months, new Cadillacs
were going to come rolling off the assembly line.  That software HAD to be
there, or those cars couldn't be sold.  Every day those cars couldn't be
sold, General Motors would incur VERY, VERY LARGE interest expenses.
GM-Delco had been told that they would NOT be the cause of those expenses.

In short, make a GOOD business case that Ada will save time and money,
quantify the savings, and point out the costs of missing the deadline.

Or you could put it this way:  "If we do this in C, we're going to have
higher defect rates.  If those defects kill someone, there will be an
inquiry.  Do you really want to be identified, in court, as the man who
caused the higher defect rate, that generated the defect, that killed that
young mother?  Or would you rather be the manager who can honestly sit in
that witness stand and say he did EVERYTHING he could to ensure that the
defect rate would be as low as possible?"

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Hyman Rosen]

John R. Strohm wrote:
>  Or would you rather be the manager who can honestly sit in
> that witness stand and say he did EVERYTHING he could to ensure that the
> defect rate would be as low as possible?

"You want to use Ada? Doesn't that make rockets explode?"

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Vinzent Hoefler]

Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com> wrote:

>John R. Strohm wrote:
>>  Or would you rather be the manager who can honestly sit in
>> that witness stand and say he did EVERYTHING he could to ensure that the
>> defect rate would be as low as possible?
>
>"You want to use Ada? Doesn't that make rockets explode?"

"Yeah, but with $OTHER_LANGUAGE they even wouldn't have a chance to
fly!" ;-)


Vinzent.

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Vinzent Hoefler]

"John R. Strohm" <strohm@airmail.net> wrote:

>"Vinzent Hoefler" <JeLlyFish.software@gmx.net> wrote in message
>news:b0cil5$nrsvj$1@ID-175126.news.dfncis.de...
>> "John R. Strohm" <strohm@airmail.net> wrote:
>>
>> >In other words, trying to save a few pennies on software development
>> >toolsets is sheer idiocy.
>>
>> ACK. But you forgot the usual manager thinking.
>
>No, I didn't.  Instead, I explain the usual manager thinking, and the way
>the software engineer must couch the argument so as to work WITHIN the usual
>manager thinking.
>[example snipped]

Of course. But as Minsky said: "Logic doesn't apply to the real
world." Probably at least not to too much of the business world. I
gave up to understand it.


Vinzent.

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[John R. Strohm]

"Hyman Rosen" <hyrosen@mail.com> wrote in message
news:R2pW9.11080$V75.7600@nwrddc02.gnilink.net...
> John R. Strohm wrote:
> >  Or would you rather be the manager who can honestly sit in
> > that witness stand and say he did EVERYTHING he could to ensure that the
> > defect rate would be as low as possible?
>
> "You want to use Ada? Doesn't that make rockets explode?"

No.  It does not make rockets explode.  It makes Boeing 777s fly.

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Steve]

"Hyman Rosen" <hyrosen@mail.com> wrote in message
news:R2pW9.11080$V75.7600@nwrddc02.gnilink.net...
> John R. Strohm wrote:
> >  Or would you rather be the manager who can honestly sit in
> > that witness stand and say he did EVERYTHING he could to ensure that the
> > defect rate would be as low as possible?
>
> "You want to use Ada? Doesn't that make rockets explode?"
>

Rockets can be made to explode using any language.  The trick is making them
explode when and where you want them to... the first time :-)

Steve
(The Duck)

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[John R. Strohm]

"Vinzent Hoefler" <JeLlyFish.software@gmx.net> wrote in message
news:b0damu$olm3h$2@ID-175126.news.dfncis.de...
> "John R. Strohm" <strohm@airmail.net> wrote:
>
> >"Vinzent Hoefler" <JeLlyFish.software@gmx.net> wrote in message
> >news:b0cil5$nrsvj$1@ID-175126.news.dfncis.de...
> >> "John R. Strohm" <strohm@airmail.net> wrote:
> >>
> >> >In other words, trying to save a few pennies on software development
> >> >toolsets is sheer idiocy.
> >>
> >> ACK. But you forgot the usual manager thinking.
> >
> >No, I didn't.  Instead, I explain the usual manager thinking, and the way
> >the software engineer must couch the argument so as to work WITHIN the
usual
> >manager thinking.
> >[example snipped]
>
> Of course. But as Minsky said: "Logic doesn't apply to the real
> world." Probably at least not to too much of the business world. I
> gave up to understand it.

You have to learn their language.

Let me give you an example.  A whole bunch of companies spent a lot of money
on Expert Systems work in the 1980s because of a couple of huge success
stories.  Digital Equipment Corporation did the VAX configurator, that saved
them a huge boatload of money.  BBN did a geology expert system that found a
monster ore deposit that humans had overlooked.  When you show a beancounter
that you can make him REAL MONEY using technology, he'll listen.

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Kevin Cline]

"John R. Strohm" <strohm@airmail.net> wrote in message news:<6FD73B2917327E23.5FF84A56513A69C6.AC3092FBD5BCEE58@lp.airnews.net>...
> Or you could put it this way:  "If we do this in C, we're going to have
> higher defect rates.  If those defects kill someone, there will be an
> inquiry.  Do you really want to be identified, in court, as the man who
> caused the higher defect rate, that generated the defect, that killed that
> young mother?  Or would you rather be the manager who can honestly sit in
> that witness stand and say he did EVERYTHING he could to ensure that the
> defect rate would be as low as possible?"

You could, but your manager would reply that the vast majority of
embedded programming today is being done in C, and yet product
liability
settlements and recalls due to bugs in embedded C code are quite rare,
and that his team has long experience writing embedded code in C 
and that so far projects have been delivered on time with acceptable
defect rates.  In short, that you are proposing a risky solution to a
non-existent
problem.

Re: Engineers Pay

[Alan and Carmel Brain]

"John R. Strohm" <strohm@airmail.net> wrote in message

> In the United States, with all overhead considered, a good engineer costs
> his employer on the rough order of $250,000 per year

In Australia, with all overhead, taxes, insurance, etc etc it's about
USD $60,000. That's assuming 10+ years experience. Graduates - half that.
Of course, the actual pay (before taxes) is about 2/3 of those figures.

Actual case: programmer with 20+ years, including 15+ of Ada-83 and
Ada-95, several successful projects under his belt, salary $80,000 AUD
or just over $40,000 USD. Cost of employment, about $115,000 AUD (it's
an efficient firm, but his pay's way above average.).

This BTW makes selling software productivity enhancement tools *hard*.
Something that doubles productivity had better cost less than USD $250,000
per bum-on-seat or it won't pay off before it's obsolete. This is for
firms that are at CMM 3 and above (in practice, anyway).

For a 10% improvement, the cost had better be less than USD $20,000.

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Dmitry A. Kazakov]

John R. Strohm wrote:

> "Vinzent Hoefler" <JeLlyFish.software@gmx.net> wrote in message
> news:b0damu$olm3h$2@ID-175126.news.dfncis.de...
>> "John R. Strohm" <strohm@airmail.net> wrote:
>>
>> >"Vinzent Hoefler" <JeLlyFish.software@gmx.net> wrote in message
>> >news:b0cil5$nrsvj$1@ID-175126.news.dfncis.de...
>> >> "John R. Strohm" <strohm@airmail.net> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> >In other words, trying to save a few pennies on software development
>> >> >toolsets is sheer idiocy.
>> >>
>> >> ACK. But you forgot the usual manager thinking.
>> >
>> >No, I didn't.  Instead, I explain the usual manager thinking, and the
>> >way the software engineer must couch the argument so as to work WITHIN
>> >the
> usual
>> >manager thinking.
>> >[example snipped]
>>
>> Of course. But as Minsky said: "Logic doesn't apply to the real
>> world." Probably at least not to too much of the business world. I
>> gave up to understand it.
> 
> You have to learn their language.
> 
> Let me give you an example.  A whole bunch of companies spent a lot of
> money on Expert Systems work in the 1980s because of a couple of huge
> success
> stories.  Digital Equipment Corporation did the VAX configurator, that
> saved them a huge boatload of money.

DEC is dead, because of managers' ingorance.

I have no info for brake control, but motor control is written in C. The 
problem is that people who make decisions and those who care responsibility 
for the consequences of the decisions are different people.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
www.dmitry-kazakov.de

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Marin David Condic]

I'm basically with you here, but keep in mind a couple of things. One is
that from a manager's view of things, "Language A" at a cost of $20 versus
"Language B" at a cost of $20,000 starts looking like a no-brainer.
"Language B" had better have some real hard evidence that it is $19,980
better than "L:anguage A" or the manager is just seeing it as pissing away
his budget needlessly. Hence Ada needs to come in at a price that is
competitive with other languages (often "free" in the microcontroller world
because they throw it in with a development board - O.K., its bundled so not
really "free" but when the development board is $250..$500, you can barely
see any real cost there.)

The other thing being that the prior poster had a valid point about using
HC11/HC12 or 8051 processors. Ada might be the most wonderful thing to come
along since shirt pockets, but can you get Ada for some of these small
microcontrollers? At any price? And if so, does it come with all of the
spiffy development tools one might get by using the manufacturer's supplied
development kit? (And I'd like to avoid the inevitable observations about
getting an Ada compiler to generate C code and then use the manufacturer's
development kit. It tends to be a no-sale since you've got to add layers of
stuff and additional costs on top of what usually amounts to being a small
project anyway. Even if it costs me some productivity and I have to spend
twice as long in testing to insure product reliability, I'm still probably
better off than spending lots of money and valuable time up front cobbling
together the Ada and C compilers with unproven and dubious results.)

I'm a fan of Ada and I'd like to see it used in embedded microcontroller
projects. I think that long term it would be a benefit to such projects, But
until Ada development kits are available at competitive prices and they're
just sitting there on the board manufacturer's development kit, its a really
tough sale to make. Perhaps if someone were to design a nice little
microcontroller board and targeted Gnat to it & provided all the tools
needed, that might be a way to gain some acceptance of Ada in that world. I
just don't see anyone jumping up and down waving their hands and saying "Oh
Please! Let *me* do that job!!!" :-)

MDC
--
======================================================================
Marin David Condic
I work for: http://www.belcan.com/
My project is: http://www.jast.mil/

Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ a c m . o r g

    "I'd trade it all for just a little more"
        --  Charles Montgomery Burns, [4F10]
======================================================================

John R. Strohm <strohm@airmail.net> wrote in message
news:C2E97C094C00112D.3534546977D61EFF.8CD62D3596DEEE44@lp.airnews.net...
>
> In other words, trying to save a few pennies on software development
> toolsets is sheer idiocy.
>
>

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Marin David Condic]

Just remember that Ada tends to show its cost and defect advantages in large
scale projects rather than small ones. On large scale projects, there are
also lots of other factors (such as process, design, etc.) that can be far
more important to reliability & schedule - Ada can't cure that either.

If the tools are available, the Ada case gets easier, but it still has to
overcome institutional inertia and lack of software engineering culture that
may exist in many shops.

MDC
--
======================================================================
Marin David Condic
I work for: http://www.belcan.com/
My project is: http://www.jast.mil/

Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ a c m . o r g

    "I'd trade it all for just a little more"
        --  Charles Montgomery Burns, [4F10]
======================================================================

John R. Strohm <strohm@airmail.net> wrote in message
news:6FD73B2917327E23.5FF84A56513A69C6.AC3092FBD5BCEE58@lp.airnews.net...
>
> In short, make a GOOD business case that Ada will save time and money,
> quantify the savings, and point out the costs of missing the deadline.
>
> Or you could put it this way:  "If we do this in C, we're going to have
> higher defect rates.  If those defects kill someone, there will be an
> inquiry.  Do you really want to be identified, in court, as the man who
> caused the higher defect rate, that generated the defect, that killed that
> young mother?  Or would you rather be the manager who can honestly sit in
> that witness stand and say he did EVERYTHING he could to ensure that the
> defect rate would be as low as possible?"
>
>
>

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Marin David Condic]

Absolutely! Yeah, verrily! And Amen!

Engineers tend to think that the object of the game is to use really
advanced tools to build really cool stuff. Bzzzzzttt! Wrong Answer! The
object of the game is to MAKE MONEY and the sooner Ada can start showing
people how it MAKES MONEY, the sooner it will start finding acceptance
against all of the objections of the anti-Ada software developers that don't
want to use it. If the industry that manufactures blivets uses predominantly
C and someone starts a business to make blivets and uses Ada and starts
coming out with better, less expensive blivets that show up earlier to
market, you'll see Ada catch on in the blivet industry like wildfire.

Unfortunately, I suspect that Ada would be only one small factor in
improving the overall performance of most industries. Hence, the management
view of "A language is a language is a language..." Other factors can easily
outweigh whatever advantages Ada has over its competitors. That's why I
think its important for Ada to evolve a whole toolset to improve
productivity for some segment of the commercial world - to add more leverage
than the language alone can produce.

MDC
--
======================================================================
Marin David Condic
I work for: http://www.belcan.com/
My project is: http://www.jast.mil/

Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ a c m . o r g

    "I'd trade it all for just a little more"
        --  Charles Montgomery Burns, [4F10]
======================================================================

John R. Strohm <strohm@airmail.net> wrote in message
news:DFEB74B72ECC1424.38F3492A4FC37FE2.7686CDC7A4899242@lp.airnews.net...
>
> You have to learn their language.
>
> Let me give you an example.  A whole bunch of companies spent a lot of
money
> on Expert Systems work in the 1980s because of a couple of huge success
> stories.  Digital Equipment Corporation did the VAX configurator, that
saved
> them a huge boatload of money.  BBN did a geology expert system that found
 a
> monster ore deposit that humans had overlooked.  When you show a
beancounter
> that you can make him REAL MONEY using technology, he'll listen.
>
>
>

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Bernd Specht]

kcline17@hotmail.com (Kevin Cline) wrote in
news:ba162549.0301182210.67d74505@posting.google.com: 
> You could, but your manager would reply that the vast majority of
> embedded programming today is being done in C, and yet product
> liability
> settlements and recalls due to bugs in embedded C code are quite rare,
> and that his team has long experience writing embedded code in C 
> and that so far projects have been delivered on time with acceptable
> defect rates.  In short, that you are proposing a risky solution to a
> non-existent
> problem.
> 

Full ack. 

If it's a small company, let say five sw-developer, three hw-developers etc, 
they made some products with C, the complete tool-chain is based on C, and 
now you say:"Trow it all away, spend $50000, and make it in Ada now (with 
untrained personal,who really _likes_ C) the they will call you "lunatic" 
and you can search a new job.

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Alfred Hilscher]

Well, nice. But - what do you test, debug, document and so on: Ada or
C-code?


Larry Kilgallen schrieb:
> 
> In article <3E296128.4183B70A@t-online.de>, Alfred Hilscher <Alfred.Hilscher@t-online.de> writes:
> 
> > Assume you have to program a brake control for car, would you do it in
> > Ada? Then I would like to know which tools you use. The systems I know
> > are based on microcontrollers HC11/HC12 or 8051. _I_ don't know any
> > Ada-compiler for these chips. While there are a lot of C develop
> > environments, there are only very few for Modula, and none for Ada.
> > Please correct me if I'm wrong.
> 
> The SofCheck AdaMagic compiler is available in a form that uses ANSI C
> as an intermediate language.   Thus any target machine for which you
> have an ANSI C compiler can be programmed using Ada.  Using this method
> one automatically takes advantage of whatever peephole optimization the
> hardware-specific C compiler provides.
> 
>         http://www.sofcheck.com

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Alfred Hilscher]

"John R. Strohm" schrieb:
> 
> Have you ever been exposed to basic engineering economics?
> 
> In the United States, with all overhead considered, a good engineer costs
> his employer on the rough order of $250,000 per year.  I would be very
> surprised if the price was that much different in Germany.  When you are
> talking about spending that kind of money on software engineers, trying to
> pinch pennies on their tools is idiocy.  What you want is tools that will
> improve their productivity, that will let them get more work done per year.

Company has successful products, all done with C. Company has complete
tool-chain - in C. Company has well educated developers - all
specialists for C. 

So now I come and say:
 
> Recall that Pratt & Whitney documented 2x productivity improvement using
> Ada.

Lets throw all away, we could gain twice the productivity with Ada (the
costs are about 50x). What do you think is the answer?

> 
> AND FURTHERMORE.
> 
> When you are talking specifically about brake controls for cars, you have to
> recognize a few things.  First, you are talking about a safety-critical
> system. 

Yes, but - don't they work today?

> Anything less than the absolute best NO-FAIL quality is
> unacceptable,

When did you buy your last car? Did you ask the salesman: "Is the brake
programmed in Ada?" I'm sure, you didn't.

> because people will get killed AND THEIR SURVIVING RELATIVES
> WILL SUE YOUR COMPANY OUT OF EXISTENCE.

First they have to proof that it was a software fault. Here in Germany,
cars have no black box and no voice recorder. So it would be a little
bit hard.

> In other words, trying to save a few pennies on software development
> toolsets is sheer idiocy.

No, it's not called "idiotic", it's called "shareholder value".

RE: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Robert C. Leif]

Since Ada can now be compiled to the ECMA intermediate language, which is
being used by Microsoft, there is a significant incentive for chip
manufacturers to host the ECMA intermediate language. Consequently, they
will have inadvertently facilitated the hosting of Ada on their chips.
For those who prefer operating systems other than those produced by
Microsoft, the code generator for the ECMA intermediate language should be
or could be hosted on systems, such as Linux.
Since the equivalent of this was done with UCSD Pascal, it is absolutely not
a new idea.
Bob Leif

-----Original Message-----
From: Marin David Condic [mailto:mcondic.auntie.spam@acm.org] 
Sent: Sunday, January 19, 2003 8:19 AM
To: comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org
Subject: Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

I'm basically with you here, but keep in mind a couple of things. One is
that from a manager's view of things, "Language A" at a cost of $20 versus
"Language B" at a cost of $20,000 starts looking like a no-brainer.
"Language B" had better have some real hard evidence that it is $19,980
better than "L:anguage A" or the manager is just seeing it as pissing away
his budget needlessly. Hence Ada needs to come in at a price that is
competitive with other languages (often "free" in the microcontroller world
because they throw it in with a development board - O.K., its bundled so not
really "free" but when the development board is $250..$500, you can barely
see any real cost there.)

The other thing being that the prior poster had a valid point about using
HC11/HC12 or 8051 processors. Ada might be the most wonderful thing to come
along since shirt pockets, but can you get Ada for some of these small
microcontrollers? At any price? And if so, does it come with all of the
spiffy development tools one might get by using the manufacturer's supplied
development kit? (And I'd like to avoid the inevitable observations about
getting an Ada compiler to generate C code and then use the manufacturer's
development kit. It tends to be a no-sale since you've got to add layers of
stuff and additional costs on top of what usually amounts to being a small
project anyway. Even if it costs me some productivity and I have to spend
twice as long in testing to insure product reliability, I'm still probably
better off than spending lots of money and valuable time up front cobbling
together the Ada and C compilers with unproven and dubious results.)

I'm a fan of Ada and I'd like to see it used in embedded microcontroller
projects. I think that long term it would be a benefit to such projects, But
until Ada development kits are available at competitive prices and they're
just sitting there on the board manufacturer's development kit, its a really
tough sale to make. Perhaps if someone were to design a nice little
microcontroller board and targeted Gnat to it & provided all the tools
needed, that might be a way to gain some acceptance of Ada in that world. I
just don't see anyone jumping up and down waving their hands and saying "Oh
Please! Let *me* do that job!!!" :-)

MDC
--
======================================================================
Marin David Condic
I work for: http://www.belcan.com/
My project is: http://www.jast.mil/

Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ a c m . o r g

    "I'd trade it all for just a little more"
        --  Charles Montgomery Burns, [4F10]
======================================================================

John R. Strohm <strohm@airmail.net> wrote in message
news:C2E97C094C00112D.3534546977D61EFF.8CD62D3596DEEE44@lp.airnews.net...
>
> In other words, trying to save a few pennies on software development
> toolsets is sheer idiocy.
>
>

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Dale Stanbrough]

Marin David Condic wrote:

> 
> I'm a fan of Ada and I'd like to see it used in embedded microcontroller
> projects. I think that long term it would be a benefit to such projects, But
> until Ada development kits are available at competitive prices and they're
> just sitting there on the board manufacturer's development kit, its a really
> tough sale to make. Perhaps if someone were to design a nice little
> microcontroller board and targeted Gnat to it & provided all the tools
> needed, that might be a way to gain some acceptance of Ada in that world.

What sort of stuff goes into one of these kits?

dale

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[John R. Strohm]

That was PRECISELY what Rational did with the R1000, back in the mid-1980s.

I really wish I had taken the time to research the business case, and do a
proper chart pitch on it, with supporting data in detail.  I sketched it out
on the back of some piece of paper or another, but I never got around to
fleshing it out.

The numbers Rational was disseminating, which were backed up by other
organizations who gave the product an honest try, were just-plain
phenomenal.  As in "you don't have to build a new building to house the next
project" phenomenal.

I think I could have made the case JUST on parking lot costs at GD/FW.

"Marin David Condic" <mcondic.auntie.spam@acm.org> wrote in message
news:b0ekls$ktt$1@slb5.atl.mindspring.net...
> Absolutely! Yeah, verrily! And Amen!
>
> Engineers tend to think that the object of the game is to use really
> advanced tools to build really cool stuff. Bzzzzzttt! Wrong Answer! The
> object of the game is to MAKE MONEY and the sooner Ada can start showing
> people how it MAKES MONEY, the sooner it will start finding acceptance
> against all of the objections of the anti-Ada software developers that
don't
> want to use it. If the industry that manufactures blivets uses
predominantly
> C and someone starts a business to make blivets and uses Ada and starts
> coming out with better, less expensive blivets that show up earlier to
> market, you'll see Ada catch on in the blivet industry like wildfire.
>
> Unfortunately, I suspect that Ada would be only one small factor in
> improving the overall performance of most industries. Hence, the
management
> view of "A language is a language is a language..." Other factors can
easily
> outweigh whatever advantages Ada has over its competitors. That's why I
> think its important for Ada to evolve a whole toolset to improve
> productivity for some segment of the commercial world - to add more
leverage
> than the language alone can produce.
>
> MDC
> --
> ======================================================================
> Marin David Condic
> I work for: http://www.belcan.com/
> My project is: http://www.jast.mil/
>
> Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ a c m . o r g
>
>     "I'd trade it all for just a little more"
>         --  Charles Montgomery Burns, [4F10]
> ======================================================================
>
> John R. Strohm <strohm@airmail.net> wrote in message
> news:DFEB74B72ECC1424.38F3492A4FC37FE2.7686CDC7A4899242@lp.airnews.net...
> >
> > You have to learn their language.
> >
> > Let me give you an example.  A whole bunch of companies spent a lot of
> money
> > on Expert Systems work in the 1980s because of a couple of huge success
> > stories.  Digital Equipment Corporation did the VAX configurator, that
> saved
> > them a huge boatload of money.  BBN did a geology expert system that
found
>  a
> > monster ore deposit that humans had overlooked.  When you show a
> beancounter
> > that you can make him REAL MONEY using technology, he'll listen.
> >
> >
> >
>
>

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Larry Kilgallen]

In article <3E2AEA0C.7AD2A87F@t-online.de>, Alfred Hilscher <Alfred.Hilscher@t-online.de> writes:
> Well, nice. But - what do you test, debug, document and so on: Ada or
> C-code?
> 
> 
> Larry Kilgallen schrieb:
>> 
>> In article <3E296128.4183B70A@t-online.de>, Alfred Hilscher <Alfred.Hilscher@t-online.de> writes:
>> 
>> > Assume you have to program a brake control for car, would you do it in
>> > Ada? Then I would like to know which tools you use. The systems I know
>> > are based on microcontrollers HC11/HC12 or 8051. _I_ don't know any
>> > Ada-compiler for these chips. While there are a lot of C develop
>> > environments, there are only very few for Modula, and none for Ada.
>> > Please correct me if I'm wrong.
>> 
>> The SofCheck AdaMagic compiler is available in a form that uses ANSI C
>> as an intermediate language.   Thus any target machine for which you
>> have an ANSI C compiler can be programmed using Ada.  Using this method
>> one automatically takes advantage of whatever peephole optimization the
>> hardware-specific C compiler provides.
>> 
>>         http://www.sofcheck.com

When programming in Fortran, do you test, debug and document in
Fortran or in the Intermediate Language of your Fortran compiler ?

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Tor Fredrik Aas]

"Dale Stanbrough" <dstanbro@bigpond.net.au> wrote in message
news:dstanbro-98F327.07243820012003@mec2.bigpond.net.au...
> Marin David Condic wrote:
>
> >
> > I'm a fan of Ada and I'd like to see it used in embedded microcontroller
> > projects. I think that long term it would be a benefit to such projects,
But
> > until Ada development kits are available at competitive prices and
they're
> > just sitting there on the board manufacturer's development kit, its a
really
> > tough sale to make. Perhaps if someone were to design a nice little
> > microcontroller board and targeted Gnat to it & provided all the tools
> > needed, that might be a way to gain some acceptance of Ada in that
world.
>
> What sort of stuff goes into one of these kits?
>


Mostly an assembler, linker , a limited software simulator/debugger and some
form of interface for burning/uploading your images to the controller. Most
also include an interface to an ICE or a similar device for debugging. This
is usually integrated in a spiffy IDE.

As an interesting observation the AVR RISC controller product line from
Atmel does not come with a C compiler, but has a good interface for
integrating tools from other vendors ( IAR C seems to be popular). This has
of course inspired some souls to port gcc to avr, a tutorial for setting up
AVRStudio with avrgcc is availible at www.avrfreaks.org

Someone has mentioned that gcc-3.x has been compiled with Ada support for
AVR targets, without run-time support. So this means that AVRStudio probably
can be integrated with support for Ada to some degree. This is restricted to
Windows since AVRStudio is a strictly windows product. Unix and Linux
developers should look at the commandline tools in the avrgcc and binutils +
some software to burn the controllers ( several open-source and freeware
products exist ).

Well, this is getting really of topic so I'll end it here.

--
Tor Fredrik Aas

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Georg Bauhaus]

John R. Strohm <strohm@airmail.net> wrote:
: In the United States, with all overhead considered, a good engineer costs
: his employer on the rough order of $250,000 per year.  I would be very
: surprised if the price was that much different in Germany.

Does that include the very small shops?

Would you be even more surprised to hear that the prices in Germany
go up as you move down from North to South? Let alone Switzerland,
where most Germans will find shocking figures on the bill of fare.

Also, the "suing culture" reported from the USA is not really present
here. 

-- Georg

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[karl bowl]

"Alfred Hilscher" <Alfred.Hilscher@t-online.de> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:3E296128.4183B70A@t-online.de...

> I have a question to you, too.
>
> Assume you have to program a brake control for car, would you do it in
> Ada? Then I would like to know which tools you use. The systems I know
> are based on microcontrollers HC11/HC12 or 8051. _I_ don't know any
> Ada-compiler for these chips. While there are a lot of C develop
> environments, there are only very few for Modula, and none for Ada.
> Please correct me if I'm wrong.
>
> The next point is: C systems are cheap and even free available.  Modula
> systems are expensive. But - Ada prices are far beyond from good and
> bad. Have you ever heard the prices from Green Hills for example? A
> small company with five to ten people can not buy it. And what I've
> heard about ACT-prices, they seem not be suitable, too. Embedded systems
> in non military environment have not some k-dollars available for
> sw-tools.

I belong to a group of programmers for movement control systems based on
80x86-Processor (embedded system).
As far as now, we have used pascal 86. But now, we would like to change,
because the tools for sw-development
in this language have been going rare.
There are a group of colleagues, they prefer Modula2. But I think, Modula2
is not used very often and so there are not
distributions, whitch provides good tools for sw-development (i. e. a source
code debugger for the target system).
Therfore, I am looking for alternatives - i. e. Ada.
Another big point is, that the language we choose, should be a language with
strong type checking.
The price is important for us but as less important as the point mentioned
before.

Nic

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Jerry Petrey]

karl bowl wrote:

>
> I belong to a group of programmers for movement control systems based on
> 80x86-Processor (embedded system).
> As far as now, we have used pascal 86. But now, we would like to change,
> because the tools for sw-development
> in this language have been going rare.
> There are a group of colleagues, they prefer Modula2. But I think, Modula2
> is not used very often and so there are not
> distributions, whitch provides good tools for sw-development (i. e. a source
> code debugger for the target system).
> Therfore, I am looking for alternatives - i. e. Ada.
> Another big point is, that the language we choose, should be a language with
> strong type checking.
> The price is important for us but as less important as the point mentioned
> before.
>
> Nic

We use the DDC-I Ada compiler for a 80x86 target in an embedded system
and have been very happy with their tools and support.  Take a look at their new

SCORE product (http://www.ddci.com/).
I think you are right in considering Ada.

Best Wishes,
Jerry
--
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

-- Jerry Petrey
-- Senior Principal Systems Engineer - Navigation (GPS/INS), Guidance, & Control

-- Raytheon Missile Systems          - Member Team Ada & Team Forth
-- NOTE: please remove <NOSPAM> in email address to reply
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[John R. Strohm]

Yes, it does, for ongoing concerns (i.e., out of the garage and in real
offices, with staff).

If you have access to a good business database, do some searching.  In the
United States, you will find that a healthy engineering-related business
typically has sales on the order of $300,000 per employee.  This number is
remarkably constant against size of the organization, and is a very
effective way of measuring the health of the organization.

When I noticed this, I started paying attention.  I ran into a couple of
apparently-large companies with significantly lower sales per employee.
Upon investigation, it turned out that their U.S. organization was
essentially a very small sales office, and the bulk of the firm was located
in India, where costs are MUCH lower.  I also ran into a couple such that
were U.S. firms, that were in financial trouble, but had enough stored
dollars to keep going until things turned around.

"Georg Bauhaus" <sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de> wrote in message
news:b0gjd8$1oq$1@a1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de...
> John R. Strohm <strohm@airmail.net> wrote:
> : In the United States, with all overhead considered, a good engineer
costs
> : his employer on the rough order of $250,000 per year.  I would be very
> : surprised if the price was that much different in Germany.
>
> Does that include the very small shops?
>
> Would you be even more surprised to hear that the prices in Germany
> go up as you move down from North to South? Let alone Switzerland,
> where most Germans will find shocking figures on the bill of fare.
>
> Also, the "suing culture" reported from the USA is not really present
> here.
>
> -- Georg

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Alfred Hilscher]

karl bowl schrieb:
> I belong to a group of programmers for movement control systems based on
> 80x86-Processor (embedded system).
> As far as now, we have used pascal 86. But now, we would like to change,
> because the tools for sw-development
> in this language have been going rare.
> There are a group of colleagues, they prefer Modula2. But I think, Modula2
> is not used very often and so there are not
> distributions, whitch provides good tools for sw-development (i. e. a source
> code debugger for the target system).

A friend of mine works in the embedded area and he is using Modula-2.
(www.pmsgmbh.de) I often tried to get him to Ada, but there are far less
Ada-tools than Modula-tools, and the prices for Ada are far beyond of
what he could spend.

> Therfore, I am looking for alternatives - i. e. Ada.
> Another big point is, that the language we choose, should be a language with
> strong type checking.

Do you want say, Modula has _no_ strong typing? Or do I missunderstand
you?

> The price is important for us but as less important as the point mentioned
> before.

See above.
 
> Nic

Why Nic and not Karl?

Re: Engineers Pay

[Kevin Cline]

"Alan and Carmel Brain" <aebrain@webone.com.au> wrote in message news:<3e2a9af2$1@iridium.webone.com.au>...
> "John R. Strohm" <strohm@airmail.net> wrote in message
> 
> > In the United States, with all overhead considered, a good engineer costs
> > his employer on the rough order of $250,000 per year
> 
> In Australia, with all overhead, taxes, insurance, etc etc it's about
> USD $60,000. That's assuming 10+ years experience. Graduates - half that.
> Of course, the actual pay (before taxes) is about 2/3 of those figures.
> 
> Actual case: programmer with 20+ years, including 15+ of Ada-83 and
> Ada-95, several successful projects under his belt, salary $80,000 AUD
> or just over $40,000 USD. Cost of employment, about $115,000 AUD (it's
> an efficient firm, but his pay's way above average.).

I'm doubtful that Australian firms can run with so little overhead.
The figure of USD $250,000 presumably includes not only the payroll
taxes and benefits but also the cost of space, equipment, and supervisory
and administrative personell.  USD $250K or $USD 1000 per day
is about what the company would charge for the engineer's time.

The marginal cost of adding a single person is probably quite a lot
lower than that.

Re: Engineers Pay

[John R. Strohm]

"Kevin Cline" <kcline17@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:ba162549.0301202312.68f8be15@posting.google.com...
> "Alan and Carmel Brain" <aebrain@webone.com.au> wrote in message
news:<3e2a9af2$1@iridium.webone.com.au>...
> > "John R. Strohm" <strohm@airmail.net> wrote in message
> >
> > > In the United States, with all overhead considered, a good engineer
costs
> > > his employer on the rough order of $250,000 per year
> >
> > In Australia, with all overhead, taxes, insurance, etc etc it's about
> > USD $60,000. That's assuming 10+ years experience. Graduates - half
that.
> > Of course, the actual pay (before taxes) is about 2/3 of those figures.
> >
> > Actual case: programmer with 20+ years, including 15+ of Ada-83 and
> > Ada-95, several successful projects under his belt, salary $80,000 AUD
> > or just over $40,000 USD. Cost of employment, about $115,000 AUD (it's
> > an efficient firm, but his pay's way above average.).

Just out of curiosity, how many employees at the firm, what were their
annual sales, what was their profit margin after everything?  Annual sales
divided by number of employees turns out to be a very useful metric for the
health of the company.

> I'm doubtful that Australian firms can run with so little overhead.
> The figure of USD $250,000 presumably includes not only the payroll
> taxes and benefits but also the cost of space, equipment, and supervisory
> and administrative personell.  USD $250K or $USD 1000 per day
> is about what the company would charge for the engineer's time.

Precisely.

> The marginal cost of adding a single person is probably quite a lot
> lower than that.

Yes and no.  At some point, you can't add one more engineer without
reorganizing and adding a manager, or two or three.  It is much simpler to
figure the total cost of management and divide it across all the billable
engineers.

Think of adding boards to a chassis.  At some point, you run out of slots,
and you have to buy an expansion chassis, and power supply, and cabling.  Th
at costs beaucoup bucks.  Maybe you have to buy a whole new rack, because
there's no room in the existing rack for the new chassis.  Maybe you have to
have the facilities electrician come out and wire a new outlet, because the
existing circuit is fully loaded by the existing rack, and facilities will
be UNHAPPY if your new rack and chassis and board overloads the circuit and
starts a fire.

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Marin David Condic]

My recollection of the R1000 was that it was extremely expensive and that
you had problems if you were targeting things other than the R1000. IOW
"Yeah. Great. It saves me truckloads of money - only after spending
truckloads of money. And tell me how do I get it to do the job I need it to
do???"

I didn't know they had some business case or study showing massive
improvements. The only case I knew of was that they had comparisons of
building/maintaining their Ada compiler in Ada vs. C that showed similar
productivity & defect results to my own study at Pratt. These numbers are
interesting but not always compelling. At Pratt, we were talking about a
very specific kind of software that does not compare favorably to the bulk
of software development situations for a variety of reasons. At the same
time, we were hardly maintaining "All Other Things Being Equal" - Ada was
only one part of what was changed over the life of the study, so it wasn't a
controlled experiment with Ada being the only variable. And even if it was,
software development was itself only a small part of the overall development
cost so that while it was still worth doing, the results to the bottom line
were not necessarily that dramatic.

For those reasons (while I still believe Ada helps productivity and defects)
I continue to suggest that additional leverage and capabilities be
considered as part of what Ada needs to do to gain increased acceptance. You
get an improvement, but it may not be significant enough to command change
because it may not be a big enough improvement to outweigh other factors.
If, for example, you had an Ada development kit that got garden variety PC
apps built in half the time as the other tools available, it would start to
become compelling. (By which I mean time to market - not overall lifetime
costs) Those who ignored it would be out-competed by those who didn't.
(Which also means us Ada advocates need to consider making products using
Ada rather than just trying to convince others to use Ada in their
products.)

MDC
--
======================================================================
Marin David Condic
I work for: http://www.belcan.com/
My project is: http://www.jast.mil/

Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ a c m . o r g

    "I'd trade it all for just a little more"
        --  Charles Montgomery Burns, [4F10]
======================================================================

John R. Strohm <strohm@airmail.net> wrote in message
news:F23B14A456899489.0502B771BABDEE1B.FFE1A3839E068A22@lp.airnews.net...
> That was PRECISELY what Rational did with the R1000, back in the
mid-1980s.
>
> I really wish I had taken the time to research the business case, and do a
> proper chart pitch on it, with supporting data in detail.  I sketched it
out
> on the back of some piece of paper or another, but I never got around to
> fleshing it out.
>
> The numbers Rational was disseminating, which were backed up by other
> organizations who gave the product an honest try, were just-plain
> phenomenal.  As in "you don't have to build a new building to house the
next
> project" phenomenal.
>
> I think I could have made the case JUST on parking lot costs at GD/FW.
>

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Marin David Condic]

Lots of stuff. Depends on the board. You could look at some of the web sites
for various SBC manufacturers and see what they offer. Often you've got a
kit that plugs into the PC - maybe with Ethernet and/or a UART. They've got
bootstrap loaders, communication to the SBC for text I/O, on-board debugging
facilities, off-board (PC based) debuggers, maybe some sort of executive or
RTOS, a cross-compiler (obviously) with reasonably sophisticated linkage
editors, maybe a real-time monitor, etc. All sorts of goodies. There's a lot
more software than just a compiler targeting a chip.

Also, there's all kinds of C code available for a variety of embedded
development projects. You want a Java interpreter? Or maybe something to
parse HTML? Or who-knows-what-else? Chances are, someone's got some C code
you can incorporate in your box. Not that Ada doesn't have similar tools out
there in many cases, but there sure can be a lot more effort to find them if
they do exist.

All that infrastructure starts to add up to a significant barrier to entry.
If Ada wants to play, some developer has to feel secure that he's got all
the same infrastructure or it adds cost and risk to the project. Again,
remember that these are typically *small* developments so nobody wants to
take time to assemble all the pieces or hack together whatever they need and
if Ada has a benefit, it is likely to be marginal. Its a tough sale to
make...

MDC
--
======================================================================
Marin David Condic
I work for: http://www.belcan.com/
My project is: http://www.jast.mil/

Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ a c m . o r g

    "I'd trade it all for just a little more"
        --  Charles Montgomery Burns, [4F10]
======================================================================

Dale Stanbrough <dstanbro@bigpond.net.au> wrote in message
news:dstanbro-98F327.07243820012003@mec2.bigpond.net.au...
>
> What sort of stuff goes into one of these kits?
>
> dale

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Stephen Leake]

Alfred Hilscher <Alfred.Hilscher@t-online.de> writes:

> A friend of mine works in the embedded area and he is using Modula-2.
> (www.pmsgmbh.de) I often tried to get him to Ada, but there are far less
> Ada-tools than Modula-tools, and the prices for Ada are far beyond of
> what he could spend.

Just for comparison, what are the costs for the Modula tools, and what
support do you get for that cost?

GNAT for embedded x86 can be had for free, if you are willing to work
without formal support.

-- 
-- Stephe

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[karl bowl]

"Alfred Hilscher" <Alfred.Hilscher@t-online.de> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:3E2C7C94.9D7ED14@t-online.de...

> Do you want say, Modula has _no_ strong typing? Or do I missunderstand
> you?

Thats not what I meant.
Modula2 is also a language, witch provide a strong type checking.
But I think, there are no tools for sw developing we need.
The opine some of my collegues about this is, that Modula2 is a zero_ fault
_language. Therefore a debugger i. e.  is not neccessary.
This is not my opinion.

> Why Nic and not Karl?

This is not my own account.

Nic

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Robert A Duff]

Alfred Hilscher <Alfred.Hilscher@t-online.de> writes:

> Well, nice. But - what do you test, debug, document and so on: Ada or
> C-code?

You test the machine code, of course.

You debug either at the Ada level or the C level -- your choice.  The
Ada compiler can insert #line directives and whatnot into the generated
C code, so that one can set breakpoints on Ada lines and so forth.  It's
not perfect, but it works.  In some cases, you need to understand the
mapping from Ada names to C names, for example (which is fairly
obvious).  On some targets, the debugger has been trained to understand
Ada better.

You document the Ada code.  The C code is just an intermediate language
used by the compiler, and can be ignored by the programmer, except in
some debugging situations.

SofCheck also supports other targets for Ada that do not use C as an
intermediate language.

> Larry Kilgallen schrieb:
> > 
> > In article <3E296128.4183B70A@t-online.de>, Alfred Hilscher <Alfred.Hilscher@t-online.de> writes:
> > 
> > > Assume you have to program a brake control for car, would you do it in
> > > Ada? Then I would like to know which tools you use. The systems I know
> > > are based on microcontrollers HC11/HC12 or 8051. _I_ don't know any
> > > Ada-compiler for these chips. While there are a lot of C develop
> > > environments, there are only very few for Modula, and none for Ada.
> > > Please correct me if I'm wrong.
> > 
> > The SofCheck AdaMagic compiler is available in a form that uses ANSI C
> > as an intermediate language.   Thus any target machine for which you
> > have an ANSI C compiler can be programmed using Ada.  Using this method
> > one automatically takes advantage of whatever peephole optimization the
> > hardware-specific C compiler provides.
> > 
> >         http://www.sofcheck.com

Robert A. Duff
Vice President of Engineering
SofCheck, Inc.

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Alfred Hilscher]

karl bowl schrieb:
> 
> "Alfred Hilscher" <Alfred.Hilscher@t-online.de> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
> news:3E2C7C94.9D7ED14@t-online.de...
> The opine some of my collegues about this is, that Modula2 is a zero_ fault
> _language.

Well, Modula-code (like Ada-code) is less errorprone than C. But - zero?
This depends on the size. A "hello world"-application - perhaps. A 50000
line numeric contol for production maschines - unlikely.

> Therefore a debugger i. e.  is not neccessary.

I worked many years with Modula, a runtime-debugger did I never use. But
- a post mortem debugger (Logitech) is very valuable (for Modula, not
always for Ada).

> This is not my opinion.

http://www.pmsgmbh.de/HTML/Werkzeuge.html

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Alfred Hilscher]

Stephen Leake schrieb:
> 
> Alfred Hilscher <Alfred.Hilscher@t-online.de> writes:
> Just for comparison, what are the costs for the Modula tools, and what

$1500 - $2500

> support do you get for that cost?

Less. But - what support is neccessary? The language - one should know.
Immediate error corrections - not neccessary if a workaround is
available. A toolset with very less bugs - expected.
 
> GNAT for embedded x86 can be had for free,

??? I never seen it. As far as I know, this is only available for
GNATPRO customers.

> GNAT for embedded x86 can be had for free,

Which runtime?

> GNAT for embedded x86 can be had for free,

The requirement is HC11/HC12/8051,TLCS900,Infineon C166

> if you are willing to work
> without formal support.

Where? How? I'm very interessted in.

Re: Engineers Pay

[John R. Strohm]

Yep.

Now multiply US$130/hr by 40 hrs/wk * 50 wks/yr and see what you get.

"Dennis Lee Bieber" <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com> wrote in message
news:hub1g-vu3.ln1@beastie.ix.netcom.com...
> Kevin Cline fed this fish to the penguins on Monday 20 January 2003
> 11:12 pm:
>
> > and administrative personell.  USD $250K or $USD 1000 per day
> > is about what the company would charge for the engineer's time.
> >
>         If I recall from attendance at the financial portion of a few
design
> reviews, a number in the range of US$130 per hour was quoted for the
> individuals directly involved (coders, testers, engineers -- but not
> general management) in the project. Of that amount, less than US$50
> went to my salary ($45/hour); the rest was used to pay for my cubicle,
> supplies (printer supplies), and clerical labor (travel office,
> secretarial support).
>
>
> --
>  > ============================================================== <
>  >   wlfraed@ix.netcom.com  | Wulfraed  Dennis Lee Bieber  KD6MOG <
>  >      wulfraed@dm.net     |       Bestiaria Support Staff       <
>  > ============================================================== <
>  >        Bestiaria Home Page: http://www.beastie.dm.net/         <
>  >            Home Page: http://www.dm.net/~wulfraed/             <
>

Re: Engineers Pay

[John R. Strohm]

"Dennis Lee Bieber" <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com> wrote in message
news:hub1g-vu3.ln1@beastie.ix.netcom.com...
> Kevin Cline fed this fish to the penguins on Monday 20 January 2003
> 11:12 pm:
>
> > and administrative personell.  USD $250K or $USD 1000 per day
> > is about what the company would charge for the engineer's time.
> >
>         If I recall from attendance at the financial portion of a few
design
> reviews, a number in the range of US$130 per hour was quoted for the
> individuals directly involved (coders, testers, engineers -- but not
> general management) in the project. Of that amount, less than US$50
> went to my salary ($45/hour); the rest was used to pay for my cubicle,
> supplies (printer supplies), and clerical labor (travel office,
> secretarial support).

Assuming for the sake of argument that this was a defense contractor, you
also need to bear in mind that the government audits those numbers.  There
is a certain profit margin built in, and the government allows for that,
but, if the margin is excessive, they can (and do) renegotiate it down.

Summary: those numbers, for salary, cubicle, supplies, and support, have to
be strongly based in reality.

What THAT means is that you, the engineer, really do cost the company about
that much.  The company makes it back by selling your labor, with the other
charges rolled in, and a little left over for profit.

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Stephen Leake]

Alfred Hilscher <Alfred.Hilscher@t-online.de> writes:

> Stephen Leake schrieb:
> > 
> > Alfred Hilscher <Alfred.Hilscher@t-online.de> writes:
> > Just for comparison, what are the costs for the Modula tools, and what
> 
> $1500 - $2500
> 
> > support do you get for that cost?
> 
> Less. 

Less than what? ACT?

> But - what support is neccessary? The language - one should know.

Subtle points about the language implementation on this processor and
runtime; essential.

> Immediate error corrections - not neccessary if a workaround is
> available. A toolset with very less bugs - expected.
>  
> > GNAT for embedded x86 can be had for free,
> 
> ??? I never seen it. As far as I know, this is only available for
> GNATPRO customers.

Get the source from any gcc mirror, configure it as a cross compiler,
and compile. No problem.

> Which runtime?

There are many that the gcc compiler supports; VxWorks, RTEMS, lots
more (I don't have the list handy; read the source).

> The requirement is HC11/HC12/8051,

I think these are 8 bit machines; you won't get Ada for them.

> TLCS900,Infineon C166

I have not heard of these. Check the gcc source to see if it supports
them; look in config.guess.

> > if you are willing to work without formal support.
> 
> Where? How? I'm very interessted in.

You have to be willing and able to read the sources (Makefiles, weird
shell scripts) and documents (often out of date). But it is possible.

-- 
-- Stephe

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Alfred Hilscher]

AG schrieb:
> 
> "Stephen Leake" <Stephen.A.Leake@nasa.gov> wrote in message
> news:uadhraj99.fsf@nasa.gov...
> > Subtle points about the language implementation on this processor and
> > runtime; essential.
> 
> Hold on a second: did you mean processor & runtime as a target
> or development platform? If as a target, a cross-compiler is no big
> deal is it? 

Don't know. Where and how get it?

> If as a development platform, are you sure you can get
> the latest and greatest C?? compiler, tools and IDE to run on that
> sort of 8-biters?

Sorry, this is not really a question, isn't it? If you work in the
embedded area, you know that these processors are often used as
_targets_. Nobody (today) would use them as host for development.

Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[AG]

"Stephen Leake" <Stephen.A.Leake@nasa.gov> wrote in message
news:uadhraj99.fsf@nasa.gov...
> Alfred Hilscher <Alfred.Hilscher@t-online.de> writes:

> Subtle points about the language implementation on this processor and
> runtime; essential.

Hold on a second: did you mean processor & runtime as a target
or development platform? If as a target, a cross-compiler is no big
deal is it? If as a development platform, are you sure you can get
the latest and greatest C?? compiler, tools and IDE to run on that
sort of 8-biters?

> > The requirement is HC11/HC12/8051,
>
> I think these are 8 bit machines; you won't get Ada for them.
>
> > TLCS900,Infineon C166
>
> I have not heard of these. Check the gcc source to see if it supports
> them; look in config.guess.