Interesting embedded Ada news

Interesting embedded Ada news

[mjsilva]

A couple of things caught my eye recently.  First, a biggie IMO.  AdaCore has announced their ARM Cortex product:

http://www.adacore.com/press/gnat-pro-safety-critical-for-arm/

Is this likely to end up on the list of libre offerings?

Second, Jack Ganssle had good words for the book "Building Parallel, Embedded, and Real-Time Applications with Ada" which came out a year or two ago:

http://www.embedded.com/electronics-blogs/other/4411676/A-new-Embedded-Ada-book?cid=Newsletter+-+Whats+New+on+Embedded.com

Re: Interesting embedded Ada news

[Randy Brukardt]

Gee, these things have been on AdaIC.org for a long time. (OK, I posed the 
Ganssle article yesterday. :-) What's the big deal? Doesn't anyone here read 
the news listings on the AdaIC home page??

                              Randy.

<mjsilva@scriptoriumdesigns.com> wrote in message 
news:8c61c35f-708e-49ee-b43c-ba53fe7944be@googlegroups.com...
>A couple of things caught my eye recently.  First, a biggie IMO.  AdaCore 
>has announced their ARM Cortex product:
>
> http://www.adacore.com/press/gnat-pro-safety-critical-for-arm/
>
> Is this likely to end up on the list of libre offerings?
>
> Second, Jack Ganssle had good words for the book "Building Parallel, 
> Embedded, and Real-Time Applications with Ada" which came out a year or 
> two ago:
>
> http://www.embedded.com/electronics-blogs/other/4411676/A-new-Embedded-Ada-book?cid=Newsletter+-+Whats+New+on+Embedded.com 

Re: Interesting embedded Ada news

[Anh Vo]

On Friday, April 12, 2013 5:37:37 PM UTC-7, Randy Brukardt wrote:
> Gee, these things have been on AdaIC.org for a long time. (OK, I posed the 
> 
> Ganssle article yesterday. :-) What's the big deal? Doesn't anyone here read 
> 
> the news listings on the AdaIC home page??
> 

I read it nearly all the time.

A. Vo

Re: Interesting embedded Ada news

[Anh Vo]

On Friday, April 12, 2013 6:36:37 PM UTC-7, Anh Vo wrote:
>> On Friday, April 12, 2013 5:37:37 PM UTC-7, Randy Brukardt wrote: 
>> What's the big deal? Doesn't anyone here read 
>> the news listings on the AdaIC home page?? 

> I read it nearly all the time.

Now AdaIC home page is down currently. Do you know why Randy?

Anh Vo

Re: Interesting embedded Ada news

[Randy Brukardt]

"Anh Vo" <anhvofrcaus@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:67d6a72c-816a-4905-a07e-cdfd6f0e4100@googlegroups.com...
> On Friday, April 12, 2013 6:36:37 PM UTC-7, Anh Vo wrote:
>>> On Friday, April 12, 2013 5:37:37 PM UTC-7, Randy Brukardt wrote:
>>> What's the big deal? Doesn't anyone here read
>>> the news listings on the AdaIC home page??
>
>> I read it nearly all the time.
>
> Now AdaIC home page is down currently. Do you know why Randy?

It seems OK to me. In any case, I don't know much about how it is hosted 
(AdaCore is providing that these days).

                                     Randy.

Re: Interesting embedded Ada news

[Jacob Sparre Andersen]

"Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com> writes:

> Doesn't anyone here read the news listings on the AdaIC home page?

Not nearly as often as I read this newsgroup.  (But I am a bit
old-fashioned in my reading patterns.)

Greetings,

Jacob
-- 
"Klingon programs don't have parameters.
 They have arguments and win them."

Re: Interesting embedded Ada news

[Jacob Sparre Andersen]

Randy Brukardt wrote:

> Doesn't anyone here read the news listings on the AdaIC home page?

The RSS feed from the AdaIC home page has been added to
<http://planet.ada.cx/>.  Hopefully this will increase the readership of
the news from AdaIC a bit.

Greetings,

Jacob
-- 
Stop the proliferation of weapons of maths instruction!

Re: Interesting embedded Ada news

[Randy Brukardt]

"Jacob Sparre Andersen" <sparre@nbi.dk> wrote in message 
news:874nf8jk5o.fsf@adaheads.sparre-andersen.dk...
> Randy Brukardt wrote:
>
>> Doesn't anyone here read the news listings on the AdaIC home page?
>
> The RSS feed from the AdaIC home page has been added to
> <http://planet.ada.cx/>.  Hopefully this will increase the readership of
> the news from AdaIC a bit.

Your entry says in part "while they don't catch every little thing out 
there, they do get a lot of it...". One of the things we didn't catch was 
(ahem) planet.ada.cx. I've added the missing link to the site and to the 
search engine. (It's under "websites" in learning materials if you care to 
find it.)

                             Randy.

Re: Interesting embedded Ada news

[Thomas Løcke]

On 04/16/2013 04:11 AM, Randy Brukardt wrote:
> Your entry says in part "while they don't catch every little thing out
> there, they do get a lot of it...". One of the things we didn't catch was
> (ahem) planet.ada.cx. I've added the missing link to the site and to the
> search engine. (It's under "websites" in learning materials if you care to
> find it.)


I did care to find it, and while doing so I stumbled over a small bug on
this page: http://www.adaic.org/learn/materials/

In the TOC the link to Websites doesn't actually do anything. You need
to change the link from this:

<li><a href="#websites">Websites</a></li>

to this

<li><a href="#web_sites">Websites</a></li>

Or alternately change the name of the anchor to websites. :o)

Also may I suggest adding these two links:

Ada @ stackoverflow
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ada

Ada Programming Community @ Google+
https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/102688015980369378804

Thanks for keeping adaic updated Randy - I've been doing a marvelous job
of neglecting the Ada-DK website, so it's good to know that other people
are keeping the news-ball rolling.

-- 
Thomas L�cke | thomas@12boo.net | http://12boo.net

Re: Interesting embedded Ada news

[Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)]

Le Tue, 16 Apr 2013 09:07:02 +0200, Thomas Løcke <thomas@12boo.net> a  
écrit:
> Ada @ stackoverflow
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ada

I don't believe stackoverflow is a so much place. Look at this question  
for an example:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15837081/ada-function-vs-procedure
Some people voted to close it, and never come back to revise a decision  
and vote to re‑open. The question was actually a real question, but was  
closed as not being a question. That's not only because it's Ada, that an  
issue with stackoverflow in the large. Better a Usenet than something like  
stackoverflow.

Then I don't believe the search engine at AdaIC can easily fetch anything  
 from stackoverflow.

-- 
“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.” [1]
“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.” [1]
[1]: Epigrams on Programming — Alan J. — P. Yale University

Re: Interesting embedded Ada news

[Simon Wright]

"Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr> writes:

> Le Tue, 16 Apr 2013 09:07:02 +0200, Thomas Løcke <thomas@12boo.net> a
> écrit:
>> Ada @ stackoverflow
>> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ada
>
> I don't believe stackoverflow is a so much place. Look at this
> question for an example:
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15837081/ada-function-vs-procedure
> Some people voted to close it, and never come back to revise a
> decision and vote to re‑open. The question was actually a real
> question, but was closed as not being a question. That's not only
> because it's Ada, that an issue with stackoverflow in the
> large. Better a Usenet than something like stackoverflow.

I know you don't (didn't) hold with Google, but the top result for
"difference between ada procedure and function" is a different SO answer
[1].

So you are right in that we could have voted to close the question as a
duplicate; but it was definitely a lazy question, showing no evidence of
research (see the comment "Unfortunately, I have 24 hours to do whatever
:)"), and deserved to be closed (or even deleted).

But I'm pretty sure you're wrong to accuse those who voted to close the
question of not knowing about Ada; and I don't believe for *one*
*moment* that the questioner wanted to know about Ada2012 functions
being able to take [in] out parameters. If they knew enough to mean
that, they would surely have asked it; and anyway see their other
comment, "I thought it is different in Ada, because I saw everyting is
different including for loops (you know, there is a 'range' loop, which
is not a for loop)".

[1]
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/721090/what-is-the-difference-between-a-function-and-a-procedure

Re: Interesting embedded Ada news

[Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)]

Le Tue, 16 Apr 2013 16:12:30 +0200, Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org> a  
écrit:
> I know you don't (didn't) hold with Google, but the top result for
> "difference between ada procedure and function" is a different SO answer
> [1].

Off‑topic: I did not remember I have commented so much on Google here ;)  
(or may be you know me from another place).

-- 
“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.” [1]
“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.” [1]
[1]: Epigrams on Programming — Alan J. — P. Yale University

Re: Interesting embedded Ada news

[Marc C]

On Tuesday, April 16, 2013 7:38:28 AM UTC-5, Hibou57 (Yannick Duchêne) wrote:

> I don't believe stackoverflow is a so much place. Look at this question  
> for an example:
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15837081/ada-function-vs-procedure
> Some people voted to close it, and never come back to revise a decision  
> and vote to re-open. The question was actually a real question, but was  
> closed as not being a question. That's not only because it's Ada, that an  
> issue with stackoverflow in the large.

StackOverflow participants do have a bias against questions being asked by individuals who have obviously not made even the most cursory effort to answer a question on their own. It is a programmer oriented Q&A site, so it is expected that the programmer asking the question has expended some effort, and then reached a point where some help is needed to clarify an issue of legitimate confusion or uncertainty. And yes, the potential answerers determine what they consider "legitimate".  (Homework questions are acceptable, so long as the questioner is upfront about it, and is asking for guidance, rather than a solution.)

As one of those who voted to close that particular question (Marc C), SO gives us only a limited set of reasons for the closure--"Not a real question" was the closest to "While grammatically a question, the fact that it takes less than 30 seconds to Google 'Ada function procedure' for an answer means Not Really" that was available.

That the question was in regard to Ada had nothing to do with voting to close it.  Along with me, two of the other four who voted to close it are well-established responders to Ada questions on StackOverflow.  Unlike some other more general-interest programming forums, anti-Ada bias is rarely seen on SO.  Just refer to Thomas' link, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ada, to see the breadth and response to Ada questions that have been posted.

> Better a Usenet than something like stackoverflow.

The Ada portions of the various sites (Stack Overflow, comp.lang.ada, Reddit - http://www.reddit.com/r/ada, Google+, LinkedIn - http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=114211) each have their own "personality" and community of users. These complement one another, nothing is gained by dissing other sites. On more than one occasion I've answered a SO question by recommending that the question be brought here to comp.lang.ada, especially if it's of the "language lawyer" type.

I regularly run into individuals for whom StackOverflow, including the ever-growing collection of Ada questions, is their primary source of programming assistance. StackOverflow and the rest of these sites are valuable resources for both the established and learning Ada community, and enhancing the ability to find information on them is obviously a good thing to do.

Marc A. Criley
Moderator, Ada sub-reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/ada)
StackOverflow contributor (http://stackoverflow.com/users/38706/marc-c)

Re: Interesting embedded Ada news

[Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)]

Le Tue, 16 Apr 2013 16:25:01 +0200, Marc C <mc.provisional@gmail.com> a  
écrit:
> each have their own "personality" and community of users. These  
> complement one another, nothing is gained by dissing other sites.

I agree in the large, I was commenting a particular point. It just happens  
I believe such a point is one of the most important (say it's a personal  
opinion based on experiences). Someone else did a similar comment on the  
Isabelle (a theorem prover) mailing list, when the question was discussed  
if whether or not it would be worth to switch from the mailing list to a  
more social-ish site like StackOverflow (he pointed a similar issue about  
some bad effects of voting).

-- 
“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.” [1]
“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.” [1]
[1]: Epigrams on Programming — Alan J. — P. Yale University

Re: Interesting embedded Ada news

[Randy Brukardt]

"Marc C" <mc.provisional@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:b5a17673-641a-4575-83ad-2e1333b9e4f8@googlegroups.com...
...
> The Ada portions of the various sites (Stack Overflow, comp.lang.ada,
> Reddit - http://www.reddit.com/r/ada, Google+,
> LinkedIn - http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=114211) each have their own 
> "personality"
> and community of users.

Thanks for reminding me about LinkedIn; I added that to the links as well. 
(Not going to waste time trying to index either that or Google+ - social 
networks rarely want anyone outside using "their" material.)

                                     Randy.

Re: Interesting embedded Ada news

[Thomas Løcke]

On 04/16/2013 02:38 PM, Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57) wrote:
> Then I don't believe the search engine at AdaIC can easily fetch
> anything from stackoverflow.


That might be the case, but stackoverflow _is_ a good resource for Ada
questions, and IMHO it is worth mentioning it somewhere at the adaic
website.

The link I gave is a resource to Ada knowledge and it gives access to
people who are knowledgable about Ada, and as such I think it deserves
at least some measure of attention.  :o)

-- 
Thomas Løcke | thomas@12boo.net | http://12boo.net

Re: Interesting embedded Ada news

[Randy Brukardt]

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"Yannick Duch�ne (Hibou57)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr> wrote in message 
news:op.wvmv2ewuule2fv@cardamome...
Le Tue, 16 Apr 2013 09:07:02 +0200, Thomas L�cke <thomas@12boo.net> a
�crit:
...
> Then I don't believe the search engine at AdaIC can easily fetch anything 
> from stackoverflow.

Certainly not easily. I just tried an index and I killed it after it tried 
to index every tag defined on the site. But there are other places we don't 
index (here being one of them), so I can't get too concerned if it is 
useful.

And it *could* be indexed; we'd just need a special driver for the indexer 
program that knows how to retrieve questions with Ada tags and index them. 
The problem, of course, is that it would break when they change the site. 
This isn't unprecedented; there is a special mode in the indexer program 
just to handle the CVS archive on Ada-auth.org, and I also have settings to 
make various wikis work. Not sure it would be worth the effort, mainly given 
the possibility of using the time to work on other things. (Recall the 
shameless plug in the last message.)

                                           Randy.

Re: Interesting embedded Ada news

[Randy Brukardt]

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"Thomas L�cke" <thomas@12boo.net> wrote in message 
news:516cf897$0$32117$14726298@news.sunsite.dk...
> On 04/16/2013 04:11 AM, Randy Brukardt wrote:
>> Your entry says in part "while they don't catch every little thing out
>> there, they do get a lot of it...". One of the things we didn't catch was
>> (ahem) planet.ada.cx. I've added the missing link to the site and to the
>> search engine. (It's under "websites" in learning materials if you care 
>> to
>> find it.)
>
> I did care to find it, and while doing so I stumbled over a small bug on
> this page: http://www.adaic.org/learn/materials/
>
> In the TOC the link to Websites doesn't actually do anything. You need
> to change the link from this:
>
> <li><a href="#websites">Websites</a></li>
>
> to this
>
> <li><a href="#web_sites">Websites</a></li>
>
> Or alternately change the name of the anchor to websites. :o)

I think I did the latter. That happened to me yesterday when I tried the 
same thing in the Wordpress viewer, but I thought it was some quirk of 
Wordpress because I couldn't see any mistake. Thanks for pointing it out.


> Also may I suggest adding these two links:
>
> Ada @ stackoverflow
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ada
>
> Ada Programming Community @ Google+
> https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/102688015980369378804

Sounds good, I've added these. You could of course have sent them to 
news@adaic.org, but I won't flog that horse too much more.

> Thanks for keeping adaic updated Randy - I've been doing a marvelous job
> of neglecting the Ada-DK website, so it's good to know that other people
> are keeping the news-ball rolling.

Well, it helps to have a budget to do such things. It makes it a lot easier 
to do the busy-work of moving links around and checking scripts. If more 
organizations would join the ARA as sponsors, we could do even more. 
<Shameless plug> http://www.adaic.org/community/join-ara/ </shameless plug>

                                      Randy.

Re: Interesting embedded Ada news

[Thomas Løcke]

On 04/17/2013 01:28 AM, Randy Brukardt wrote:
> I think I did the latter. That happened to me yesterday when I tried the
> same thing in the Wordpress viewer, but I thought it was some quirk of
> Wordpress because I couldn't see any mistake. Thanks for pointing it out.


Not to be a pain Randy, but here's another one:

http://www.adaic.org/author/brukardt/

That leads to a 404.

I noticed the link at this page:

http://www.adaic.org/2013/04/highlighting-ada-on-social-media-sites/

:o)

-- 
Thomas L�cke | thomas@12boo.net | http://12boo.net

Re: Interesting embedded Ada news

[Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)]

Le Thu, 18 Apr 2013 10:36:16 +0200, Thomas Løcke <thomas@12boo.net> a  
écrit:

> On 04/17/2013 01:28 AM, Randy Brukardt wrote:
>> I think I did the latter. That happened to me yesterday when I tried the
>> same thing in the Wordpress viewer, but I thought it was some quirk of
>> Wordpress because I couldn't see any mistake. Thanks for pointing it  
>> out.
>
>
> Not to be a pain Randy, but here's another one:
>
> http://www.adaic.org/author/brukardt/
>
> That leads to a 404.
>
> I noticed the link at this page:
>
> http://www.adaic.org/2013/04/highlighting-ada-on-social-media-sites/
>
> :o)
>

Although that's off‑topic here for this link, this one may be useful:  
http://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/


-- 
“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.” [1]
“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.” [1]
[1]: Epigrams on Programming — Alan J. — P. Yale University

Re: Interesting embedded Ada news

[Jacob Sparre Andersen]

Yannick Duchêne wrote:

[ broken links on the AdaIC site ]

> Although that's off‑topic here for this link, this one may be useful:
> http://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/

But this one is on-topic:

   http://www.adapower.com/index.php?Command=Class&ClassID=AdaWeb&CID=437

:-)

Greetings,

Jacob
-- 
"For there are only two reasons why war is made against a
 republic: The one, to become lord over her: the other, the
 fear of being occupied by her."       -- Nicolo Machiavelli

Re: Interesting embedded Ada news

[Randy Brukardt]

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"Jacob Sparre Andersen" <sparre@nbi.dk> wrote in message 
news:87ip3kj9x4.fsf@adaheads.sparre-andersen.dk...
> Yannick Duch�ne wrote:
>
> [ broken links on the AdaIC site ]
>
>> Although that's off-topic here for this link, this one may be useful:
>> http://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/
>
> But this one is on-topic:
>
>   http://www.adapower.com/index.php?Command=Class&ClassID=AdaWeb&CID=437
>
> :-)

Actually, I use the indexer for the Ada search engine to do link checking; 
that works great because we started with Tom's Finder when we built the 
search engine. (It's easy to think that if you have a crawler the rest is 
easy -- we certainly fell into that trap. :-)

I did a check a week ago or so and didn't see any (new) problems within the 
site. But Finder doesn't check tags like "#website" so I wouldn't notice 
that.

                                Randy.

Re: Interesting embedded Ada news

[Stephen Leake]

"Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr> writes:

> Although that's off‑topic here for this link, this one may be useful:
> http://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/

http://stephe-leake.org/ada/webcheck.html

-- 
-- Stephe

Re: Interesting embedded Ada news

[Randy Brukardt]

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"Thomas L�cke" <thomas@12boo.net> wrote in message 
news:516fb080$0$32111$14726298@news.sunsite.dk...
> On 04/17/2013 01:28 AM, Randy Brukardt wrote:
>> I think I did the latter. That happened to me yesterday when I tried the
>> same thing in the Wordpress viewer, but I thought it was some quirk of
>> Wordpress because I couldn't see any mistake. Thanks for pointing it out.
>
>
> Not to be a pain Randy, but here's another one:
>
> http://www.adaic.org/author/brukardt/
>
> That leads to a 404.

That's a sad story caused by using tools that no one really understands. 
Apparently, Wordpress is automatically creating these author links to 
nowhere. However, authors are "cateogories" on our dashboard, and no one 
that I've asked about it can tell us how either get rid of them nor put a 
page on the end of them. I got second-hand information that someone asked 
Wordpress support about this and found out that it is considered a bug in 
Wordpress. Thus I've been ignoring it.

I've had other issues with Wordpress - it likes to reformat my carefully 
constructed HTML; apparently it removes some HTML tags and changes others. 
That makes it iffy to make any text look as desired. It certainly wouldn't 
be my first choice for creating a web site, but it's not my choice.

                                                   Randy.

Re: Interesting embedded Ada news

[mjsilva]

On Thursday, April 11, 2013 6:05:29 PM UTC-7, mjs...@scriptoriumdesigns.com wrote:
> A couple of things caught my eye recently.  First, a biggie IMO.  AdaCore has announced their ARM Cortex product:
> 
> Is this likely to end up on the list of libre offerings?

Still curious about this question.  Anybody have any thoughts?

Re: Interesting embedded Ada news

[Jacob Sparre Andersen]

mjsilva@scriptoriumdesigns.com writes:

> On Thursday, April 11, 2013 6:05:29 PM UTC-7, mjs...@scriptoriumdesigns.com wrote:
>> A couple of things caught my eye recently.  First, a biggie IMO.
>> AdaCore has announced their ARM Cortex product:
>> 
>> Is this likely to end up on the list of libre offerings?
>
> Still curious about this question.  Anybody have any thoughts?

They already have GNAT for ARM Cortex-M on libre.  It is just camuflaged
as GNAT for Mindstorms.

Greetings,

Jacob
-- 
The secret is to bang the rocks together.

Re: Interesting embedded Ada news

[mjsilva]

On Monday, April 15, 2013 1:04:38 AM UTC-7, Jacob Sparre Andersen wrote:
> 
> They already have GNAT for ARM Cortex-M on libre.  It is just camuflaged
> 
> as GNAT for Mindstorms.

My understanding is that Mindstorms uses an ARM7 part, not a Cortex part.

Re: Interesting embedded Ada news

[Jacob Sparre Andersen]

mjsilva@scriptoriumdesigns.com writes:

> My understanding is that Mindstorms uses an ARM7 part, not a Cortex
> part.

Didn't break open my own NXT, but yes, I think you're right.  My brain
must have mixed it up with the NV3 (which is based on an ARM Cortex-A5).

Greetings,

Jacob
-- 
Photo of the day (RSS feed):
         http://billeder.sparre-andersen.dk/dagens/feed.rss2