Re: Restructuring of Ada (was RE: Ada on Cypress CY7C646 (8051)?)

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

I was thinking about SPARK while writing the post. Its a fair example of
subsetting Ada - except for the catch that you observe: SPARK is intended to
avoid "dangerous" constructs within an existing implementation of Ada. I
could use SPARK when doing safety critical programming on a PC or Unix
system with an existing compiler with little or no special compiler
modifications. A language aimed at small computers would pretty much require
that a special compiler be built. (Or at least you'd have to heavily modify
an existing compiler to accept only some subset of Ada as input and to
generate the machine code for the computer of interest.)

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/


"Philip Anderson" <phil.anderson@amsjv.com> wrote in message
news:3B209AB8.51ECEEFA@amsjv.com...
>
> Replace "small machines" with "safety-related systems" and you'll get
> the rationale for SPARK.  It's a subset of Ada, since certain constructs
> are not allowed, although extended by annotations in the form of Ada
> comments.  So it passes through any Ada compiler, which generates the
> required assembly code, but the SPARK rules are checked by SPARK tools.
>
> Of course, it's not quite the same since you need a specialist compiler
> to generate the small machine code, but I wonder whether an Ada compiler
> generating C as an intermediate level is an answer?
>