Re: Improving Ada's image - Was: 7E7 Flight Controls Electronics

["Robert I. Eachus" <rieachus@comcast.net>]

I R T wrote:

> "Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <ve3wwg@cogeco.ca> writes:
> 
> 
>>The bottom line is that unless Linux is perfect, you
>>cannot state that Ada could not have done better.
> 
> 
> Or Smalltalk, Eifel , Lisp, CPL, APL , PLI or any other language.
> 
> So what is your point ?

Speaking from personal opinion, the operating systems that I used that 
were programmed in PL/I were much better than those I used that were 
written in C.  (I have significant personal experience with Multics and 
Stratus VOS, having used both for years and done some maintenance on 
both.  PrimOS was also written in PL/I, but I had little experience with 
it.  Just a data point...

> Perhaps angels can be programmed in Ada too...

I don't know about angels, but I have worked on real-time projects where 
the OS had to be developed in Ada because the existing C "hard real 
time" OSes were anything but.*   My experience -- remember this is a 
special purpose OS not a more general OS -- was that writing the kernel, 
given a good Ada compiler that targeted the bare metal was no big deal. 
  In fact we spent a lot more time (order of 10x) defining the kernel 
interface than in implementing it.

*We were real mad at Sun.  Solaris trumpeted the fact that it supported 
hard real time, and it took us days to find out that it didn't.  But 
once we did, it was easy to find the "bug report" that explained that 
the kernel did not correctly implement the real-time interface, and 
IGNORED some of the parameters dealing with timing.  When we contacted 
Sun, they confirmed that this 'bug' existed, and was not being fixed in 
the next OS release (Solaris 7).  For all I know that is still the state 
of affairs.

-- 

                                           Robert I. Eachus

"The terrorists rejoice in the killing of the innocent, and have 
promised similar violence against Americans, against all free peoples, 
and against any Muslims who reject their ideology of murder. Their 
barbarism cannot be appeased, and their hatred cannot be satisfied. 
There's only one way to deal with terror: We must confront the enemy and 
stay on the offensive until these killers are defeated." -- George W. Bush