Re: Ada and Automotive Industry

[james@netspace.net.au (James Weaver)]

ok@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:

>I have seen a reference manual for the chip used in one brand of
>smart cards.  It was basically an 8051 with a bit more (E-PROM) memory.
>I was told that the plastic card + bonding to it cost more than the chip.

Yes.  The greatest cost of a smartcard is the printing and embossing.
The second greatest cost is the (amortisation of the capital cost of the
machine for the) milling of the card so that the chip can be bonded.
Chips are cheap.  They come in rolls like adhesive tape, and you can
get about 20,000 rolls each of 200 chips for the same price as one
embedding machine.

>It has already been explained in this newsgroup that something stripped
>down to fit the limitations of the environment (smart card, &c) could
>still be called Ada.  It has also been explained that there is a lot of
>neat stuff in Ada that would be useful.  I don't see any reason at all
>why an APPROPRIATE Ada subset could not be cross compiled to efficient
>8-bit code.  I can also think of excellent reasons why people would want
>to buy it.  The 8051 is a _weird_ beast with bit addressing for part of
>its address space but not the rest.  There used to be a half-serious
>joke about the Data-Comm Processor inside the B6700s, that it had been
>designed by a lunatic.  It did the job, but _nobody_ wrote code by hand
>for it, we used NDL.  The 8051 looks even crazier.  If I had to write
>code for an 8051, I would certainly want to prototype the thing in Ada.

Definately.  A lot of the code for these sort of machines is written
in assembly ... a stripped down version of Ada would be a far better
choice.  E.g. many of the smartcards have a DES co-pro, and the code
for sending data to the co-pro is written in assembly ... this is
the sort of time when you would trade the office coffee machine (or
almost anything else) for a rendevous mechanism.



--
Cryptography - good, fast, cheap.  Pick any two.
James Weavers	james@netspace.net.au	jaweav@cat.cs.mu.oz.au
**This is the same .sig that NASA used when they faked the moon landings**