Re: Ada Operating System

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

But that's just it: Doing a rewrite of Multix to include The Ada Way(tm)
would of necessity mandate some redesign. Making a Multix look-alike might
be of some value to somebody, but you wouldn't want to just do a
translation.

I believe that The Ada Way would be much more than a tweak. How would you
get any Ada advantages from strong type checking, etc., unless you review
the design and decide that a bunch of things that used to be kept in raw
UI32's now need to be distinguished from each other? Then you've got to
start thinking about those types needing to be in packages with appropriate
operations on them. Pretty soon, you're tossing out whole chunks of existing
code in Ada-Bar (the original language of implementation) because they can't
be easily translated using the new types/packages. Before you know it,
you're about as far from a "translation" as you can get.

If there's no advantage to writing Ada-tran then there's no advantage to a
simple translation. A plug-compatible redesign of something *might* have
some reason to exist, but I still think if you're going to "get out of the
boat" you'd better go all the way. (Build somethig that serves the original
function, but design it to be new, innovative and go beyond the original
app.)

BTW: A friend of mine once told me of a JCL interpreter written to be a Unix
shell - "because you knew somebody had to do it!" So wierder things have
been done than reimplementing Multix. :-)

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Mark Biggar" <mark.a.biggar@attbi.com> wrote in message
news:3C9249ED.45CD8ED2@attbi.com...
>
> I don't know, a reimplementation of Multix in Ada, suitably tweaked to
> the
> "Ada Way" would be a really interesting project.
>