Re: Best for small embedded systems

[davidk@os6.ifs (David Kristola)]

In article 100000@sky.net, John Howard <jhoward@sky.net> () writes:
>An Ada 95 subset allowing machine code support of Philips XA will be
>offered by my company. An XA is a 16-bit target designed with hardware 
>support for real-time multitasking. Further details will be made available
>when the product is ready for release.

Great!

>On Fri, 6 Jun 1997, Marin David Condic wrote:
>> "WhiteR@no.spam.please.crpl.cedar-rapids.lib.ia.us" writes:
>> >  I tend to agree, with the exception that there are a lot of Forth
>> >users/usages for small, resource constrained, embedded applications.
>> >You can't beat the memory efficiency.  Difficult to get up to speed
>> >and be able to _think_ in Forth, but once you do a lone wolf

I did not think it was hard to think in Forth, but then i am a stack
oriented person (you should see all the stacks of paper on my desk ;-).

>> >programmer can be very very productive (with his personal Forth
>> >vocabulary of reuseable code).
>
>I started with Forth in 1980 and stayed with it for about ten years. It is 
>alot of fun to experiment with. But every project becomes a new dialect of
>the language. I used Forth dialects on TRS-80, C-64, Atari 1200, TI 99/4A,

Ah yes, Forth on the TI 99/4A.  That brings back some great memories.

[snip]

>Ada 95 subsets can have big advantages over C and Forth. Classwide 
>programming is not provided by C. C lacks inherent support for 
>multitasking. Forth is difficult to maintain. Forth and C lack safety 
>checks that Ada can provide. Ada subsets are allowed to support efficient
>implementations of protected types and multitasking models. And bit-level
>handling is inherent to Ada. For these reasons I don't believe Forth or C
>are overly strong challenges to an Ada 95 subset which directly supports 
>the hardware of an advanced 16-bit microcontroller.

How much of a subset are we talking about (it seems that most of the
language is included if you support classwide proramming, multitasking,
and protected types).  I would hope that generics are not left out.
Can you say, or will i have to wait for the official release? :-(

>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>-- John Howard <jhoward@sky.net>               -- Team Ada  Team OS/2 --
>



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