Re: Is this ground dead? Also, info on Mach that's more recent

[dacut@henry.ece.cmu.edu (David A. Cuthbert)]

Thomas G. McWilliams <tgm@netcom.com> wrote:
>David A. Cuthbert <dacut@henry.ece.cmu.edu> wrote:
>: At any rate, relying on type safety for protection means that you
>: can't use C, C++, or assembly, or anything written in those
>: languages (so forget device drivers).  Assembly is the killer here;
>
>Have you used Ada?  Ada is type-safe and more powerful than C for
>low level bit-twiddling. Ada is a natural for device drivers and
>systems programming.

Used, no; glanced at code samples, yes.  My impression is that it
looks rather neat (nicer than C++ in many respects), but I've invested
too much into my C++ tools to even consider a switch.

I'm somewhat confused as to how Ada can be "natural" for device
drivers and systems programming.  For example, how do I code a task
switch or set up a DMA channel to a device in Ada?  Relying on a
library written in anything but Ada doesn't count.

Of course, I have no idea how I'd do that in C or C++, either, without
relying on nasty tricks like relying on assumptions about the
compiler's code generation and purposely breaking the type system.

-- 
David A. Cuthbert (dacut@ece.cmu.edu)
Graduate Student    Electrical and Computer Engineering
Data Storage Systems Center, Carnegie Mellon University