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From: Warren <ve3wwg@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: USB Boarduino on AVR-Ada Tutorial
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2010 14:16:38 +0000 (UTC)
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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Brian Drummond expounded in
news:8cjl56l69ruae3ev5ntfnjvker3uldlctg@4ax.com: 
>>The Arduino focus has always been to make it easy for people to get
>>started and teaching, which is ok.  But I think they've sometimes
>>"dumbed it down" too much.  They don't want their students to get
>>confused by technical details like upload baud rates or I/O ports
>>and pins. They'd prefer them to know that the LED is "digital pin 13"
>>instead of  Port B, bit 5 (on a particular chip).  Anyway, that's
>>just my opinion- I like to drive.
> 
> Forgot to mention:
> 
> this looks like a candidate for an "Arduino" package which contains
> all the renames, so you can "with Arduino" and write
>    Arduino.Led := On;
> or, if you want to drive the port directly, simply read the package
> instead of rummaging through data sheets and schematics.
> 
> Led types should be enumerations, or renamed subtypes of boolean,
> (On,Off) or (Off,On) according to the way they are connected, rather
> than (True,False). 
> 
> - Brian

I have no interest in doing that myself. The Arduino folks 
have what I consider, a rather extreme focus on "easy for 
new students". That's ok, it's their project.  But as part 
of that focus, they've made changes to the compiler to make 
it "a new language" to simplify it further for students -- 
so it's not strictly C/C++, though it obviously is mostly 
that.  They've even entertained making "010" mean 10 decimal,
instead of the octal value of 8 it means in true C.  To me 
this seems all wrong, but it's their project (this will have
a major impact on include files if they do it!)

So even maintaining a separate AVR C include file set may
introduce extra work. It would certainly be a full time job 
keeping a separately maintained set of Arduino "mapping 
packages" in Ada.

In my opinion, you choose an AVR platform (or family) and 
design for that.  At that point you know what your hardware
looks like.  Since you're laying out the code, you can
formalize ports etc. symbolically yourself, and thus
eliminate hard-coding.

To me, the biggest plus on the Arduino side is the cheap
and easy to use programmers, hardware, "shields" and PCBs
etc.  Now, being able to use Ada on them, is just icing
on the cake.

Warren