Re: static objects in ADA

[Mark Elson <mark@tioman.demon.co.uk>]

In a previous posting in this thread I attributed some advice to abandon
OOA&D (because object creation would take a long time) to avoid "long"
app initialisation times to Green Hills. The information came via a
third-party and it was seems there was a mis-understanding - the advice
didn't come from Green Hills (see bottom).

My sincerest apologies to Green Hills for getting this wrong - at the
time I had been led to believe the advice came from them.

In article <4IaN6CA84vI3EwTh@tioman.demon.co.uk>, Mark Elson
<mark@tioman.demon.co.uk> writes
>The "advice" has really annoyed me. It came from Green Hills and they
>were actually telling us that we should abandon an object-orientated
>design and use structured methods instead to avoid the overhead of
>object initialisation (which they believed would give us "long" start-up
>times). In fact, we are not creating any significantly large objects at
>start-up time, anyway, so I felt this was very bad advice. IMO, at the
>implementation level OO and structured methods might only differ in the
>organisation of code. There should be no reason why OO-designed code
>should be inherently less efficient than a structured design. Possibly
>inefficient activities such as dynamic memory allocation can be avoided,
>by design, if required. In fact we intend to do this for other reasons
>as the app will be safety-critical.
>
>Thanks again for the replies.

Message from 3rd party:

The advise to abandoned object orient programming came from a person who
programmed in ADA and not from Green Hills employee. This person has had
some experience in real time systems like ours but had not had to deal
with
the boot up time constraint. They were working with ADA 83 and not ADA
95.
From my understanding ,ADA 83 is not a true OO language like ADA 95.His
experience with ADA 83 was to convert existing FORTRAN code to what is
referred to as ADATRAN. This "form" of ADA is not OO in nature. It is
FORTRAN programming using ADA syntax. Because of what we need to do in
the
time allotted, he felt that maybe we would need to take the same path.
After talking to the Green Hills ADA people we have a better
understanding
of what ADA 95 is and what it is capable of doing. I believe we can use
ADA95 as it was intended.



-- 
Mark Elson