Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

["Tor Fredrik Aas" <tor.fredrik.aas@kongsberg.com>]

"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