Re: Your wish list for Ada 202X

[Georg Bauhaus <rm-host.bauhaus@maps.futureapps.de>]

On 26/03/14 19:47, Simon Wright wrote:
> "G.B." <rm-dash-bau-haus@dash.futureapps.de> writes:
>
>> IIRC, programs for VxWorks don't even need an Ada runtime to provide
>> tasking support. Systems like these provide an opportunity for another
>> profile, one that should make upgrading compilers easier.
>
> But they do need one for Ada tasking support!
>
> Tasking on VxWorks using Ada bindings of the VxWorks tasking primitives
> would have little if any benefit over the C version. No protected types
> for a start! No rendezvous!

You are right, I was actually thinking of “no_task_types”.
What I remembered was a talk by someone whose team did a VxWorks
project for a British railroad something, explaining
how they would wrap a process in a "VxWorks procedure",
written in Ada. So, there would be protected types, I guess.

Nevertheless, there is much that makes Ada different solely
because of its fundamental type system:
The most recent MS-Word/Outlook bug is another instance of
errors that keep being caused by, as the CVE entry explains,
a language that has no bounds checking for indexing arrays.

Side note: SPARK rests on top of things expressed
and expressible in Ada in its (almost) unique ways,
in the small, and without pointers.

An Ada profile for even sequential programs only is worth money.