Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

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

Sounds interesting. Obviously, if the programmer doesn't see the C
intermediary steps and just gets code out the back end, then its just
another Ada compiler. However, I'd still have concerns about gluing it onto
someone's embedded C development environment because of the post-compilation
stuff. You need to play with the linkage editor & loader and it remains a
question in my mind if that is just going to invisibly look like Ada or if
you're going to need to treat it more from the intermediate C perspective.
After that, you've got to deal with the possible existence of source-level
debuggers and other testing tools. Are these going to see the Ada code - or
go referencing back to the C code?

I am not saying it can't be done or that doing it may not be of value. What
I'm saying is that it would likely require quite a bit of investigation just
to see what would be involved in doing the job and what quality the finished
product would have. After that there is certainly a non-trivial amount of
work in pulling the pieces together. If I was actively using the Z-World
board and familiar with its development environment, a lot of the assessment
would be already in my head. Without a funded mandate to go forth and kill,
its hard to justify the time committment. :-)

If we had a vendor interested in adding Ada as an additional front-end and
was willing to pay to merge the tools, that would really be something.
Unless I can talk my current employers into programming Cable-TV boxes in
Ada, I'm not likely to find the time to look into it. (Work is the curse of
the Language Advocate? :-)

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/


"Tucker Taft" <stt@averstar.com> wrote in message
news:3AB0E994.A2B2D3C6@averstar.com...
> Actually, one of the interesting things working with the version
> of our Ada 95 technology that uses C as an intermediate is how
> it illustrates exactly what you are giving up by going to C.
> All of the consistency checks performed by Ada at compile-time,
> plus the additional checks which are performed at run-time when
> they can't be proved safe by the compiler, are generally all lost
> when you write in C "by hand."  By looking at the generated
> C you immediately see all the run-time checks that remain, and
> it makes me cringe to think that people writing by hand in C
> don't have any of those safety checks performed.  And that is *after*
> our optimizer has already eliminated many of the provably-safe checks.
>
> For what it is worth, the "glued together" compiler is actually
> quite easy to use, and it "feels" like a regular Ada compiler, except
> that if you want to check up on what the compiler is doing, you
> can save and look at the generated C code rather than having
> to look at the generated machine code.  By default, the intermediate
> C code is deleted, so all that is left is a ".obj"/".o" just like
> a "regular" compiler.
>