(LONG) WUARCHIVE/PAL Release of SmallAda Interpreter for DOS/MAC

(LONG) WUARCHIVE/PAL Release of SmallAda Interpreter for DOS/MAC

[cis.ohio-state.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!wupost!wuarchive.wustl.edu!conn]

Release Notice
Release of: SmallAda "Pascal subset" Ada Interpreter
------------------------------
1. Taxonomy:
    ADA COMPILER
        SMALLADA
------------------------------
2. Author:
    Prof. Michael B. Feldman et al (see ABSTRACT)
    Dept of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
    The George Washington University
    Washington, DC 20052
    202-994-5253 (voice)
    202-994-5294 (fax)
------------------------------
3. Rights:
    Educational use only
------------------------------
4. Abstract:
S M A L L A d a   1 9 9 1
IBM PC-family version

This is a compiler/interpreter for a part of the Ada language, namely
the "Pascal subset" plus the Ada tasking support. It is not intended
ever to be a full Ada compiler, rather a vehicle for teaching, learning,
and experimenting with concurrent programming. The compiler is quite
fast, producing P-code which is then interpreted by the interpreter.

The system will run on an IBM PC (or compatible) with the following
minimum configuration: 640K of memory; one disk drive. A hard disk will
greatly improve the speed. The entire system runs in RAM with no disk
accesses, so expect capacity to be limited. 250 statements or so can
be safely accommodated.

SmallAda executables and demo programs are distributed as a self-
extracting archive created by LHA. To install SmallAda, just create a 
directory on your hard disk called, say, smallada, move to that
directory, and execute the self-extracting archive sm-archv directly
from your diskette. If your diskette is in drive A:, just type
A:\SM-ARCHV.

The current version is not particularly robust, rather it is a preliminary
step toward effective window-oriented monitoring of task execution.

This package may be copied and used for educational purposes but not for
profit; please let us know by e-mail or regular mail how you like the idea 
of this package and what you are doing with it. The more users we know
we have, the better our case for getting funding to continue the work.

project supervised by
Prof. Michael B. Feldman
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The George Washington University
Washington, DC 20052
202-994-5253 (voice)
202-994-5294 (fax)
mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu

authors:
1986 Charles Schoening             DOS version of CoPascal
1987 Frederick C. Hathorn          conversion of CoPascal to Ada
1988 Stuart Cramer and Jay Kurtz   refinement of tasking model
1989 Arthur V. Lopes               window-oriented monitoring for IBM-PC
1990 Manuel A. Perez               Macintosh version
1990 Arthur V. Lopes               integrated environment for IBM-PC
1991 Amr El-Kadi                   user-selectable task scheduling

THE SmallAda SUPPORT PACKAGE (SMALL_SP.PKG)
===========================================

A large number of "intrinsic" library subroutines are included in a
pseudo-package called SMALL_SP.PKG. It is not necessary (or proper) to
compile this package; it is included in the environment. It is necessary
to begin each program with a context clause

WITH SMALL_SP; USE SMALL_SP;

to give the effect of writing genuine Ada. A specification for this
package is included in the distribution; it includes I/O routines,
math functions, and the like. This is not really good Ada-like
decomposition, and we will change it in subsequent versions of the
system. Meanwhile, use the package spec as a guide to all the
intrinsic routines. Note especially that the formatting parameters
supplied to the I/O procedures are more Pascal-like than Ada-like.
This will change later to look more like standard TEXT_IO.


THE DEMONSTRATION PROGRAMS
==========================

We have supplied a set of what we hope will be interesting and instructive
programs illustrating both the sequential aspects of the Ada subset and
the tasking model.

TEST1 through TEST6 can be thought of as "validation" programs testing 
specific features of the language; reading them can serve a useful
purpose in understanding our subset.

ATEST1 through ATEST4 demonstrate the differences in program behavior
under different scheduling policies. Each program contains a block
comment explaining its purpose in this demonstration.

SHELLSORT is what its name implies: a standard implementation of Shell sort
in which the state of the array is displayed on the screen as it is sorted;
RACE is a tasking program which we have used with success in concurrent
programming courses: three sort algorithms are activated as Ada tasks
and run in parallel.

4TASKSEM shows the use of the semaphore primitives "exported" by the
SMALL_SP pseudo-package. A semaphore SCREEN is declared and used to
give mutual exclusion on the terminal screen.

Attention: semaphores are NOT Ada primitives! SmallAda was originally 
constructed as a modification to the CoPascal system of Ben-Ari
(as described in "Principles of Concurrent Programming", Prentice Hall
1982), and the semaphore primitives are still there from the system's last
incarnation. To show how to do it in "real" Ada, we include the program
4TASKMON, in which a screen monitor task is declared.

Finally, there are three versions of Dijkstra's legendary dining
philosophers problem. SmallAda has a capacity limitation of around
ten tasks. We are limited to four instead of the usual five philosophers,
because four diners, four chopsticks, and MAIN add up to 9 tasks.
EATCHAOS is very instructive: it demonstrates why it's nice to have
monitors for mutual exclusion: without a monitor guarding the screen,
the display becomes rather chaotic. EAT-SEM uses the SmallAda semaphore
primitives; EAT-MON does the same thing but with a "genuine" Ada monitor.
------------------------------
5. Directory Listing:
total 4
drwxr-xr-x   2 conn     archive      512 Jun 05 16:14 dos
drwxr-xr-x   2 conn     archive      512 Jun 05 16:14 mac

languages/ada/smallada/dos:
total 160
-rw-r--r--   1 conn     archive    11725 Jun 05 15:21 README
-rw-r--r--   1 conn     archive   123139 Jun 05 15:22 sm-archv.exe
-rw-r--r--   1 conn     archive    11725 Jun 05 15:22 smallada.doc

languages/ada/smallada/mac:
total 242
-rw-r--r--   1 conn     archive     9394 Jun 05 09:41 smadamac.doc
-rw-r--r--   1 conn     archive   225024 Jun 05 09:28 smallada.sea
-- 
====================================================================
Richard Conn, ASR and PAL Manager  |  conn@wuarchive.wustl.edu