Re: Ada used in General Aviation (GA) applications?

["Kai Glaesner" <this.is@void.de>]

Randy,

> Ada's share of non-embedded markets is zero to any reasonable precision
that
> you want to use. I don't forsee that changing in any significant way (the
> $25 I can put into marketing Ada and Claw isn't going to make any
> difference). The only place it gets used is in larger embedded systems
(like
> avionics, ATC, etc.)But perhaps you are using some odd-ball definition of
> "embedded"??

So the question is: what's embedded?

When I was working for a small avionics company several years ago producing
"Flight Inspection" and navigation avionics they developed their software in
Modula-2 using VMEbus Motorola boards running OS9. Is that embedded?

I think today's avionics tend to more and more based on COTS hardware and
rely heavily on concurrency, distribution, being physical connected via
ethernet and using kind of realtime-ORB's as an communication
infrastructure.

Do you catch the drift? These are all domains Ada is good in.

I dont think the problem are Ada compilers being targeted to the wrong
processor, but software managers in avionic business not knowing about Ada
capabilities in the above mentioned architectures. This leeds to e.g UPSAT
(now Garmin) deploying a PC104-based(certified) Moving Map Display (the
MX20), dvelopped in C/C++ running under Windoze NT(!).

Regards

Kai