Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

["Tarjei T. Jensen" <tarjei.jensen@kvaerner.com>]

Marin David Condic wrote in message <970ma1$1l7$1@nh.pace.co.uk>...
>I could imagine Ada being popular in electrical engineering departments if
>there were a convenient and inexpensive (maybe free?) Ada environment for
>playing around with embedded computing. It would have to work "off the
>shelf" with readily available hardware so that some prof could build a
>class/lab around it & students could afford to play with it on their own. I
>am thinking of Dr. McCormick's model railroad class or the Lego robot
>discussed here a while ago. If either of these was packaged as "An embedded
>programming course in a bag" so that a prof could just pick it up and start
>teaching it, this might go a long way toward encouraging Ada as an
>educational tool as well as a practical tool for building real-world
>systems.
>
>(Does anyone smell commercial possibilities here? :-)

It is clearly commercial possibilities if you can find a decent and cheap
PC/104 card or a PC motherboard/bios to work with. Then it should be a matter
of documenting how to use gnat and/or RTEMS to get results. You may have to
write a few drivers for the network card or graphics card.

You would have a great teaching tool and a easy kit to commercialize.


Greetings,