Re: howto make system calls (newbie question)

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

It is part of the history of Ada which seems to color a lot of the decisions
that are made with current Ada language design. Ada did not have any native
I/O instructions that may have made I/O less painful specifically because it
was originally supposed to be for embedded computers where you could not be
guaranteed proper support of specialized I/O instructions. Hence, its all a
bunch of packages that can easily be excluded from an implementation wherein
they make no sense.

Now that Ada is much more general purpose in nature, it may be time to break
out of the "embedded system" thinking. This might lead to language changes
that make it more useful for development on PC's & workstations. However,
the risk of doing so is that one might then invent a language that is no
longer suited for embedded systems - and this would hurt the feelings of
those of us who do that kind of work. That might be A Bad Thing.

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/


"Beard, Frank" <beardf@spawar.navy.mil> wrote in message
news:mailman.989010544.30700.comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org...
> I thought Ada was designed to be a general purpose language,
> and among those purposes was strong support for embedded
> systems.
>
> If what you are saying "where there may be no OS at all"
> were a major part of the premise, then, as I said in
> another post, we would not have Ada.Command_Line, as
> well as some other packages.
>