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From: larry@VLSI.JPL.NASA.GOV
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Ada a Real-Time Prog. Lang.?
Message-ID: <890417115011.e5c@VLSI.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Date: 17 Apr 89 18:50:11 GMT
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>And...wasn't Ada supposed to run on embedded systems where all tasks 
>are lightweight, and there is no notion of ...?

No, that's propaganda or ignorance.  Ada is not a special-purpose language 
designed for real-time processing.  It's an excellent general-purpose 
programming language with some rudimentary real-time capability.  See the 
two special editions of Ada Letters on the Int'l Workshops on Real-Time Ada 
Issues for more discussion.

What the designers of Ada did was more far-sighted.  They designed a language 
that is not only general-purpose but extensible, via its library and typing 
mechanisms.  Thus it can contain spaceships and invoices as first-class 
objects that can be used as naturally as numbers and character arrays.  
(Though this capability requires some tweaking, as the recent discussions 
of overloading assignment shows.)

Anticipating much wider use of distributed and multi-processor computing 
systems, they included the rudiments of concurrent programming based on 
communicating sequential processes, rather than semaphores or monitors or 
such relatively low-level mechanisms which depend upon uni-processor 
architectures.
                                  Larry @ VLSI.JPL.NASA.GOV