Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

["Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com>]

That sounds interesting. I'm wondering what sort of students you present
this to and what are the learning objectives? Do you think they learn much
about the embedded aspects, or do they learn more about realtime
programming?

My concern is that such a simulation would be useful for developing the high
level algorithms for embedded, realtime controls, but probably won't do a
good job of teaching the low level aspects of embedded programming. At the
high level, embedded programming looks much like any other kind of
programming - albeit, within a specialized problem domain. What I'd like to
find is a good, inexpensive way of teaching the low level aspects - things
like accessing different kinds of memory, interfacing to I/O devices,
utilizing hardware interrupts, etc. as well as the higher level concepts of
device control. You just don't get much of a feel for real embedded
programming unless you've had to spend time fighting with a linker to get
things located at specific places, or struggling to get bootstrap code to
load your software across a comm link, or get into the "Broken
Software/Broken Hardware" debate.

I think it would be helpful to Ada to have a good embedded/realtime
off-the-shelf course (book, software, hardware...) available, but I've just
not encountered the components that would make this possible at a practical
cost. Software simulation might make an interesting project, but I'm not
sure that it would illustrate enough of the important parts of the embedded
world.

Now possibly, if one were to bundle a compiler with a simulation of an
actual SBC with a popular processor, then you might have something there.
However, that starts becoming more work than simply designing a board and
retargeting a compiler... :-)

MDC



--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Peter Amey" <pna@praxis-cs.co.uk> wrote in message
news:3A94ED5E.4FF1E8EB@praxis-cs.co.uk...
> We have done something like this for the SPARK course.  We have a visual
> basic :-( on-screen emulation of a hardware device and students can
> drive it from their SPARK code using interface packages we provide.  The
> link between SPARK and VB is done with David Botton's excellent COM
> stuff.
>
>
> Peter