Re: Realtime and ADA - stupid newby question

[James Rogers <jimmaureenrogers@att.net>]

Marc Pelletier <marc@goldak.stopspam.ca> wrote in
news:Xns941E8F4D03B96mpgexx2@216.168.3.44: 

> Hello all,
> 
> I am planning a realtime application for data acquisition on a pc104 
> platform and investigating my OS options. I'm normally a delphi
> programmer, and rather than the pain of boning up on my very poor
> C/C++ skills, I would like to learn ADA for this project. Can someone
> please point me to some links which outline the pros and cons of the
> various OS's. I'm sure there are numerous I haven't heard of yet.

A few years ago I lead a robotic control development effort on a 
pc104 system. We looked at several good OS's. At the time the
OS's with good Ada support were Multi from GreenHills, PharLap
bundled with Aonix Object Ada, and VxWorks used with Object Ada or
Gnat.

We chose the PharLap/Object Ada combination for a number of reasons
including licensing costs. I believe any of these operating systems
offer the features you are looking for.

> 
> Of particular interest is availability of device drivers for the
> various OS's.  We need a/d converters, serial cards, gps cards... the
> usual stuff. 
> 
> Also any background info I should read before starting in on ADA would
> be great.
> 
>

You will want to read some of the online articles and books at
www.adapower.com before starting. Ada looks a lot like Pascal, but has
a lot of features that are different from Pascal. In particular you
will want to study the Ada visibility rules.

Depending upon your design, you also may want to exercise some of the
tasking capabilities of Ada. We certainly used them extensively in the
robotic system. We also used generics, streams, and tagged types.

Jim Rogers