Re: Ada OS talk (was: ADA os talk)

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

Absolutely no objection. If we had an Ada kernel that could be booted off of
a floppy into a PC and provided some rudimentary capability to load and run
another Ada program on a single processor with a single user, then you'd
really have something there.

But I think you want to have your Kernel designed such that expanding it to
multiple processors, distributed processing, etc., are not somehow hamstrung
by your early design decisions. Remember that MS-DOS was a glorified program
loader that Microsoft kept trying to breathe new life into, but ultimately
had to scrap in favor of NT. It just couldn't be built into a "real"
operating system without totally gutting it and starting fresh. There's no
point in building an Ada variation of MS-DOS and discovering it has to be
trashed because there's no way to make it schedule multiple processors, etc.
and remain backward compatible.

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/


"M. A. Alves" <maa@liacc.up.pt> wrote in message
news:mailman.999541804.22557.comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org...
>
> The resulting product would be fine, but to get things started in the
> current context you should aim low.  1 processor.  More over, a specific
> processor and architecture (PC Pentium I?).  Also, a small set of devices:
> ROM, RAM, keyboard, screen.  That was the ADX project approach.  Even thou
> they missed the Ada-France contest, I still think they did something
> (guys?)  and that the approach was the correct one for an hobby OS.
>