Re: Ada for microcontroller?

[eachus@mitre-bedford.arpa (Robert I. Eachus)]

In article <1993Jul23.123338.26421@hellgate.utah.edu> matwood%peruvian.cs.utah.
edu@cs.utah.edu (Mark Atwood) writes:

   > I'm starting on a new project that will be running on an embedded
   > controller.  Looking through the list of Validated Ada compilers,
   > I noticed that there were several for the MIL-STD-1750 processor.
   > If someone could fit Ada onto that (begin personal opinion)
   > clunky, obsolete at birth, small, slow, expensive piece of ****
   > (end personal opinion) why not for a 8051, 6805/08/11. Z80, etc.,
   > based microprocessor?

    Right now the situation seems to be that if there is interest AND
a floating-point instruction set (which maybe supported through traps
and software emulation) there will be a validated Ada compiler,
otherwise not.

   This can, of course, be traced back to the no subsets policy, even
though it was never intended to force this situation.  I could
probably cobble up a portable floating point library that would work
on even 8-bit microcontrollers (if they have enough address space!),
but this is not the right solution.  A much better resolution to the
issue would be to validate a compiler (under AI-325) with NO floating
point types and no floating-point arithmetic.  A demonstration that it
can be done, and of how to do it, would work wonders.

--

					Robert I. Eachus

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