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From: frank@bigdog.engr.arizona.edu (Frank Manning)
Subject: Re: Ada and Automotive Industry
Date: 1996/11/11
Message-ID: <5683sk$bsc@news.ccit.arizona.edu>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 195837977
references: <55ea3g$m1j@newsbf02.news.aol.com> <3280DA96.15FB@hso.link.com>
 <1996Nov6.210957.3070@ole.cdac.com>
organization: College of Engineering and Mines, University of Arizona
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.realtime
Date: 1996-11-11T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


In article <1996Nov6.210957.3070@ole.cdac.com> James Thiele
<james@cdac.com>

> I've never seen Ada for Intel 8051 or Motorola 6800
> series microcontrollers, and these are common in the
> auto industry.
>    [...]
> Why should they appreciate a bloated language that requires
> them to hire new or retrain old programmers to write
> programs that won't fit on the microcontrollers they use?

It's a myth that Ada compilers are unrealistic for small
microcontrollers. There's nothing that prevents anybody from
implementing an Ada subset that could both (a) be validated and
(b) fit harmoniously on a small machine.

I remember back in October 1995 when we had a big discussion about
the merits of Ada for small microcontrollers. Here's what Robert
Eachus and Mike Felman said at the time:

In article <EACHUS.95Nov14161604@spectre.mitre.org>
eachus@spectre.mitre.org (Robert I. Eachus) writes:

>    For Ada 83 we had AI-325: "Implementation-dependant limitations
> must be justified.  An implementation-dependant limitation is
> justified if it is impossible to or impractical to remove it, given an
> implementation's execution environment."  In Ada95 this has been
> incorporated into RM 1.1.3(6):  "Contain no variations except those
> explicitly permitted by this International Standard, or those that are
> impossible or impractical to avoid given the implementation's
> execution environment."
>
>    [...]
>
>    So anyone who wants to retarget the GNAT compiler to an 8-bit
> environment go ahead.  Validation should not be even your tenth
> biggest worry.

In article <4920s0$kqd@felix.seas.gwu.edu>
mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman) writes:

>     [...]
>
> (1) it is premature to write off the potential for an Ada/8051;
>
> (2) some of the complaints about Ada being "too big" for the 8051
>     may well be made out of ignorance of the possibilities;
>
> (3) a GCC target and a port of the GNAT runtime is the way to go.

-- Frank Manning
-- Chair, AIAA-Tucson Section