Re: Ada and embedded applications

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

For something this small, you could probably code the app in assembler and
not find any good reasons to go to a higher level language. You probably
wouldn't get any big advantages using Ada for this sort of target anyway
(other than you're working with ther *coolest* language and one where the
syntax doesn't drive you crazy. :-) Any program that could be made to run in
512 bytes of memory could be coded in Ada, C or Assembler and be made just
about equally reliable with nearly equal effort. Its just too small a system
to think you need to worry much about code readability (throw it away and
rewrite it) or software reuse (are you going to port the app somewhere
else?) or runtime constraint checks or any of the other things where Ada
gives you an edge.

Something like this you toss to a single programmer and in a few days he
hands you back a working program that has been poured over pretty thoroughly
to make sure it works right. Where you want to work with Ada is where
programs become larger, data representations become more complex, the number
of developers is bigger, etc.

It would be *nice* if Ada was available for all sorts of microcontrollers
and the quality of the compilers made it possible to use Ada for such small
memory models. I believe that there is no reason that you couldn't write
code using a subset of Ada that would be able to fit in something this
small, but it requires some work on the part of the compiler vendor to
target that kind of platform. I just don't see anyone devoting much effort
to targeting that market.

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/


"Chris Campbell" <chris.danx@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
news:c5TS6.23613$HL5.2796687@news6-win.server.ntlworld.com...
>
> Consider that at work right now, I'm working on some code for a PIC
> 16C55, which has a total of 512 bytes (no, not Kbytes, but bytes) of
> program memory available.  It might be possible to get an Ada program
> to run in that, but if so it'll take somebody a LOT smarter than me
> to do it.