From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: fdb77,5f529c91be2ac930 X-Google-Attributes: gidfdb77,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,583275b6950bf4e6 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Thread: 1108a1,59ec73856b699922 X-Google-Attributes: gid1108a1,public X-Google-Thread: 11232c,59ec73856b699922 X-Google-Attributes: gid11232c,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-04-24 16:30:24 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!postnews1.google.com!not-for-mail From: kaz@ashi.footprints.net (Kaz Kylheku) Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.advocacy,comp.object,comp.lang.ada,misc.misc Subject: Re: Using Ada for device drivers? (Was: the Ada mandate, and why it collapsed and died) Date: 24 Apr 2003 16:30:23 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com/ Message-ID: References: <9fa75d42.0304230424.10612b1a@posting.google.com> <9fa75d42.0304240446.493ca906@posting.google.com> <3EA7E0E3.8020407@crs4.it> <9fa75d42.0304240950.45114a39@posting.google.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 64.114.87.129 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1051227024 10527 127.0.0.1 (24 Apr 2003 23:30:24 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 24 Apr 2003 23:30:24 GMT Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.java.advocacy:62631 comp.object:61879 comp.lang.ada:36510 misc.misc:13667 Date: 2003-04-24T23:30:24+00:00 List-Id: softeng3456@netscape.net (soft-eng) wrote in message news:<9fa75d42.0304240950.45114a39@posting.google.com>... > Jacob Sparre Andersen wrote in message news:<3EA7E0E3.8020407@crs4.it>... > > [ FUT comp.lang.ada ] > > > > soft-eng wrote: > > > > > But if you > > > had to develop device drivers for a living, and if > > > the language was truly your choice, would you chose Ada as > > > the language? > > > > Yes. > > > > Hmmm. Very interesting. > > But I am sure you folks couldn't come up with some similar > pronouncements for AI as well. How many people out there who have > years and years of Artificial Intelligence experience and > who really think Ada is the best language for this purpose? > > Any at all? Ada is a high level assembly language like C, Pascal, Modula, PL/I and so on. It's suitable only for stone age systems programming. It doesn't matter at all which of these types of languages you use for this kind of programming; the choice is purely pragmatic based on the non-technical factors that make some languages more preferred than other languages for programming some platforms. All of these languages are really shades of the same language; they are syntactic sugars for manipulating objects which are concrete pieces of memory with explicit addresses, and have static types that closely correspond to bitwise representations. With these languages, you tell the machine what tiny word-sized quantities to funnel through its processor and in what order, to get the job done. Although Ada may be wonderful for device drivers in principle, in some platforms you will only find the hooks, toolchain support and run-time support for writing your driver in C. Boo hoo; you may have to trade one idiotic language for another, what a loss! Likewise, in some other platform, Ada may be the tool of choice, because the whole kernel is already written in it, and the support from that kernel that you need to use in your driver is already expressed in terms of Ada. If you wanted to write in C, you would have to do a bunch of work just to bootstrap yourself into being able to write a "hello, world" driver, which could have been spent writing half of the actual production driver in Ada.