Re: Ada on Raspberry Pi: new article in MagPi issue 8

[Shark8 <onewingedshark@gmail.com>]

On Sunday, December 2, 2012 9:19:56 AM UTC-8, Luke A. Guest wrote:
> 
> I'm also trying to think of a good project to document in the next articles, I
> have two ideas, but not sure about them. The aim would be to show the use of:
> 
> 
> 1) packages

Excellent idea, packages are really a fundamental Ada building-block and should be introduced early-on.

> 2) possibly separates for platform dependencies

Good idea, but you may want to deffer that to a bit later... perhaps after introducing #4 and representation clauses -- if you go with using representation clauses for low-level interfacing you can introduce separates for HW variations. 

> 3) GNAT project files & Makefiles

GPR files do seem to be _much_ better than makefiles; however, it is platform [toolchain, rather] specific. 

> 4) Representation clauses for mapping to hardware or C API's

Reading your articles I would suggest you do the main article on hardware-mapping and sidenote C-API interfacing and perhaps a small example w/layouts. 

> 5) Maybe tasking

Tasking is one of Ada's excellent features, IMO.
If we are going to introduce kids to programming via Ada, it might well behoove us to spoil them on parallel-computing w/ tasks.

> 
> Any ideas? It has to have a cool factor. Mine are:
> 
> 2) A language compiler going from source -> ELF/ARM binary.

Might I suggest an interpreter? You could explain it a bit more succinctly [and with less jargon (no need to go into linking, object files, loaders, etc)] than a compiler. (To keep syntax & parsing simple you could go with the old-school/early-computing LISP.)