Re: GNAT verses A# for soft-realtime system

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Sat, 7 Apr 2007 18:38:56 -0400, Chip and Allie Orange wrote:

> I have a computer science degree from many years back, but have worked in 
> system admin and database programming mostly since.
> 
> I now have an opportunity for a hobby project combining two of my interests 
> that I've always wanted to explore: learning Ada and programming a robot.

Greetings!

> I can purchase a Windows-based PC robot for $5k, and I'd like to learn to 
> program it to do autonomous functions (including realtime image analysis).

Great, I always wished to do something like that to play with my machine
learning project pending.

What does it mean "Windows-based PC"? Is it a sort of PC104 module running
Windows [CE] or a full-blown PC? How are sensors and actuators connected?
Does it have Ethernet controller [I wouldn't even try without one]? Does it
have a frame grabber for the camera[s]?

Usually the biggest problem is not to choose the compiler. For a hobby
there is no choice but [GPL] GNAT.

The problem is to get a fully functional Ada run-time for the board you are
using, plus the drivers for the sensors and actuators, plus TCP/IP stack
for communication with the outer world. For a Windows platform there should
be no trouble with this, except that drivers and APIs for sensors and
actuators. Often vendor's C libraries are extremely poor in quality.

> I have a choice of GNAT or A# for my programming environment.

I am sceptical about NET target. Theoretically using Ada should make you
independent on whether it be A# or not, but practically I doubt that A#
scales, especially for image processing. BTW, Ada is great for image
processing. I worked on industrial image processing projects in Ada and it
saved us a lot of time, because debugging is quite close to impossible when
you are working with images, and you know, Ada is about safety.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de