Re: LOF4 (Was Re: Extensible Enummerated types)

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com>]

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On Thu, 25 Jan 2001, Jean-Pierre Rosen wrote:
> "Brian Rogoff" <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com> a écrit dans le message news: Pine.BSF.4.21.0101230839000.15065-100000@shell5.ba.best.com...
> >> A couple of years ago, CNET in France has developped LOF4, a VLSI
> >> design program entirely in Ada.
> >Was this program in "major production use"? Not much info on the net
> >about this program either.
> It was at least used internally by CNET, but as I mentionned, it was quite a long time ago. The main developpers have moved and
> formed their own company, LEDA, specialized in VHDL products. I don't know what happenned to LOF4.

It would be interesting to find out if the spinoff company still uses
Ada. Any ideas? Personally, I think Ada would be an excellent language for
EDA tools development, since it allows you to program at a very low level
when you need to and yet easily remains readable and safe. I suspect the 
best way to make progress in this market is to develop open source "point
tools". There is very little Ada knowledge amongst EDA programmers and I'm
afraid VHDL has a very bad reputation amongst chip designers I know.

> >If we want to go all the way to France to compare obscurity, I'm afraid
> >Ada will not come out ahead, since I know that there is a (French) O'Reilly
> >book on OCaml, but I don't think there is one for Ada ;-).
> We have excellent books on Ada in French, just different publishers... If you are intersted in these, please go to
> http://pro.wanadoo.fr/adalog/biblio1.htm

Oh, I have no doubt that there are excellent Ada books in French, and I'd
love to be able to buy a translation of your book into English. The joke 
is that no language is truly successful until there is an O'Reilly book
for it :-). 

BTW, I think you missed this French Ada book  :-)

http://caml.inria.fr/books-eng.html#cnam

-- Brian