Re: Ada and embedded applications

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

....or availability. C has the advantage over Ada in that you can usually
get some version of a C compiler for a lot of small microcontrollers. Ada is
around for some 16 bit processors (not necessarily the most popular, either)
and most of the more generally used 32 bit processors (M680x0, Mips,
PowerPC, 80x86, etc.)

I'd say that anyone who prefers C over Ada in a host/target environment
where a descent implementation of Ada is available is doing so out of
ignorance (Or anti-Ada bigotry). For lots of popular processors you have
good Ada implementations & no reason not to gain its advantages over C. For
quite a few smaller processors your choices quickly become C or Assembly
language and I'd rather use C than Assembly.

This may be blasphemy, but I'd be in favor of an Ada subset for small
microcontrollers wherein any features too hard to implement or too costly
were dropped. I'd want the Ada features that had compile-time implications
(rep clauses, static checks, etc.) but would willingly abandon run-time
features (floating point, big integers, whatever) in order to have Ada as a
choice over C. That's one area where "The Mandate" ended up hurting Ada. If
there had been a 100% upward-compatible subset of Ada available for small
embedded machines, it might not have received so much resistance and might
have seen more "evolving" implementations. In the early days, Ada just bit
off more than she could chew & we're still paying that price.

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/


"Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com> wrote in message
news:zt9T6.39$yq2.1735@client...
>
> As I recall, that version could make useful programs that fit in 16K ROM
> and 2K RAM. The only reason to prefer C is ignorance...
>