REaltime ADA

REaltime ADA

[Justin CHampion]

I am currently at Staffordshire Univeristy UK, looking at what ADA can
do as a realtime language. Does nany one know of a good resource on the
Internet that can help with this research. A lot of the webpages do not
have any detail specifiy about the realtime capabilties of the language.

Thanks in advance,



Justin.

Re: REaltime ADA

[Matthew Heaney]

In article <382165D6.C6D8732@stmail.staffs.ac.uk> , Justin CHampion 
<Cg239019@stmail.staffs.ac.uk>  wrote:

> I am currently at Staffordshire Univeristy UK, looking at what ADA can
> do as a realtime language. Does nany one know of a good resource on the
> Internet that can help with this research. A lot of the webpages do not
> have any detail specifiy about the realtime capabilties of the language.

I wrote some articles about the concurrency features of the language,
which appear in the Ada95 Design Patterns archive.  Browse starting with
Jan 1999.

<http://www.acm.org/archives/patterns.html>

Matt

--
Evolution is "only a theory"?  "Creationism is not *even* a theory,
because its proponents have decided in advance that no amount of
evidence will change their beliefs."

Steve Walsh and Thomas Demere, "Facts, Faith, and Fairness"

Re: REaltime ADA

[Ted Dennison]

In article <382165D6.C6D8732@stmail.staffs.ac.uk>,
  Justin CHampion <Cg239019@stmail.staffs.ac.uk> wrote:
> I am currently at Staffordshire Univeristy UK, looking at what ADA can
> do as a realtime language. Does nany one know of a good resource on
> the Internet that can help with this research. A lot of the webpages
> do not have any detail specifiy about the realtime capabilties of the
> language.

A question about references for real time programming in Ada came up
here almost excatly one week ago. I suggest you go to deja
(http://www.deja.com) and do a search for "real time" in comp.lang.ada.
The thread you are looking for was (mis)named "GUI Design for Ada".

--
T.E.D.


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Re: REaltime ADA

[Marin Condic]

Justin CHampion wrote:

> I am currently at Staffordshire Univeristy UK, looking at what ADA can
> do as a realtime language. Does nany one know of a good resource on the
> Internet that can help with this research. A lot of the webpages do not
> have any detail specifiy about the realtime capabilties of the language.
>

Ada was originally designed to support the development of realtime and
embedded applications, so the language has quite a bit of support for such
needs. You can find lots of information on this in the Ada Reference Manual
- most importantly in the area of Tasking (see ARM 9) Exceptions (ARM 11)
Representation Issues (ARM 13) Systems Programming (ARM Annex C) Real Time
Systems (ARM Annex D). These are at least my favorite picks for the more
significant features relating to realtime programming.

You can find the ARM both on-line and in postscript form at:
http://www.adahome.com/ You should also check my links page for other Ada
related sites which may be helpful with the language in general. (See:
http://www.mcondic.com/ and look specifically at the "Links" page.)

Remember that since the language was originally designed for realtime
systems, almost every feature of the language has to be considered in this
light. The syntax and semantics of almost everything had to consider
efficiency and safety, which are major concerns in this field. That's why
the ARM and the Annotated ARM can be very useful to study.

You might also want to make a pit-stop at some of the compiler vendor's web
pages (See my links page again) because if they are selling embedded
compilers they will almost certainly have to talk about the realtime
capabilities they support. If their pages don't tell you enough, go call
them on the phone and ask for more info. They ought to be willing to send
you some brochures, etc. which may help you at least start asking the right
questions of the search engines. For realtime/embedded compilers, you'll
probably want to look first and foremost at Aonix and Green Hills. (If there
are other vendors out there who would like to boast of their
cross-compilation technology, please drop me a line and I'll make sure to
put a link to your page on mine. Cross compilation is a very important topic
for me!)


MDC
--
Marin David Condic
I'm getting to be a real short-timer, so only pencil this into your
Rolodex.....
Real Time & Embedded Systems, Propulsion Systems Analysis
United Technologies, Pratt & Whitney, Large Military Engines
M/S 731-95, P.O.B. 109600, West Palm Beach, FL, 33410-9600
***To reply, remove "bogon" from the domain name.***

Visit my web page at: http://www.mcondic.com/

Re: REaltime ADA

[Bo Sanden]

It depends a bit on what you mean. Some Ada features are intended for
real-time, embedded systems, including tasking and protected objects, which
provide interrupt handling among other things. You can find some material on

the use of Ada tasking in real-time applications on my web site,
www.pcisys.net/bsanden. One reference is to a paper in the Oct/Dec '98 issue

of IEEE Concurrency by Jeff Carter and myself called Practical use of Ada
95's concurrency features.

Another question is about Ada real-time performance. The features are
usually intended to run efficiently on a bare machine. Running on top of
something else, they may not provide acceptable real-time performance,
depending of course on what your performance requirements are.

Bo Sanden
Colorado Tech

Justin CHampion wrote:

> I am currently at Staffordshire Univeristy UK, looking at what ADA can
> do as a realtime language. Does nany one know of a good resource on the
> Internet that can help with this research. A lot of the webpages do not
> have any detail specifiy about the realtime capabilties of the language.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Justin.

Re: REaltime ADA

[Bo Sanden]

It depends a bit on what you mean. Some Ada features are intended for
real-time, embedded systems, including tasking and protected objects, which
provide interrupt handling among other things. You can find some material on
the use of Ada tasking in real-time applications on my web site,
www.pcisys.net/bsanden. One reference is to a paper in the Oct/Dec '98 issue
of IEEE Concurrency by Jeff Carter and myself called Practical use of Ada
95's concurrency features.

Another question is about Ada real-time performance. The features are
usually intended to run efficiently on a bare machine. Running on top of
something else, they may not provide acceptable real-time performance,
depending of course on what your performance requirements are.

Bo Sanden
Colorado Tech

Justin CHampion wrote:

> I am currently at Staffordshire Univeristy UK, looking at what ADA can
> do as a realtime language. Does nany one know of a good resource on the
> Internet that can help with this research. A lot of the webpages do not
> have any detail specifiy about the realtime capabilties of the language.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Justin.

Re: REaltime ADA

[Robert Dewar]

In article <3824BBA3.E5E636CC@acm.org>,
  Bo Sanden <bsanden@acm.org> wrote:
> Another question is about Ada real-time performance. The
> features are usually intended to run efficiently on a bare
> machine. Running on top of something else, they may not
> provide acceptable real-time performance, depending of course
> on what your performance requirements are.

That's too narrow, the features in Ada 95 are definitely
intended to be compatible with a wide range of operating
environments. In practice these days, at least in our
experience, most real time Ada programs are NOT running
on bare machines, but instead are using real time kernels
such as VxWorks, Lynx, RTEMS (we have customers successfully
running high performance real time programs in such
environments). I think this is pretty much the most standard
approach these days. What has happened is that machines have
got fast enough so that the extra overhead that comes from
using one of these kernels is acceptable, and of course there
are lots of other advantages in abstracting oneself one step
from the bare board. For example, in the case of GNAT, the
tasking interface from the Ada runtime to VxWorks is identical
for all versions of VxWorks.

It's certainly possible to run on bare boards, and we do have
customers doing so, including one very interesting application
involving internet switches. However, that seems to be the
exception these days.

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies


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Re: REaltime ADA

[tmoran]

Related to real-time, you might want to look at
"Concurrency in Ada" by Alan Burns and Andy Wellings,
Cambridge University Press, 1995, ISBN 0 521 41471 7

Re: REaltime ADA

[A.Subbotin]

In article <382165D6.C6D8732@stmail.staffs.ac.uk>,
  Justin CHampion <Cg239019@stmail.staffs.ac.uk> wrote:
> I am currently at Staffordshire Univeristy UK, looking at what ADA can
> do as a realtime language. Does nany one know of a good resource on
the

There even was an ISO/IEC TR 11735:1996 called "Extensions for
Real-Time Ada", meant to be a secondary Ada standard (after
the RM with its RealTime Appendix).  It looked like Ada83, though ...


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Re: REaltime ADA

[A.Subbotin]

In article <382165D6.C6D8732@stmail.staffs.ac.uk>,
  Justin CHampion <Cg239019@stmail.staffs.ac.uk> wrote:
> I am currently at Staffordshire Univeristy UK, looking at what ADA can
> do as a realtime language. Does nany one know of a good resource on
the

There even was an ISO/IEC TR 11735:1996 called "Extensions for
Real-Time Ada", meant to be a secondary Ada standard (after
the RM with its RealTime Appendix).  It looked like Ada83, though ...


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