Re: Driving Servos (was: Great opportunity for Ada application)

[Jeffrey Carter <jrcarter@acm.org>]

Martin Dowie wrote:
> Jeffrey Carter <jrcarter@acm.org> wrote in message news:<3E5432A3.9090306@acm.org>...
> 
>>This was Ada 83, reported in the late 80s or early 90s. I don't think 
>>the article is available on line.
> 
> It's here:
> 
> http://www.adahome.com/Ammo/Stories/Tartan-Realtime.html

No, that's not it, but it references the article, P.K. Lawlis and T.W. 
Elam, "Ada Outperforms Assembly: A Case Study." Proceedings of TRI-Ada, 
1992. My memory is that it was in Ada Letters, but my memory may be 
faulty, or the article may have been reprinted in Ada Letters.

The software was severely restricted in size and had very hard real-time 
requirments (microseconds, IIRC). The developers assumed that only 
assembler could meet those requirements. The assembler met the 
requirements only after a team of experts spent months hand optimizeing 
the code. The Tartan compiler was able to produce faster code that met 
the size requirements.

TI bought Tartan for its C compilers, and sold the Ada compilers to 
DDCI. I think you can still buy the Tartan Ada-83 compilers from DDCI. I 
don't know if Tartan's optimization techniques have been used in DDCI's 
Ada-95 compilers.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"Monsieur Arthur King, who has the brain of a duck, you know."
Monty Python & the Holy Grail