Re: Advice, tasking and hardware

[patrick@spellingbeewinnars.org]

Hi Guys

Thanks for the feedback this is very helpful :)

I work with scientific instruments. I have been trying to write an application to control this instrumentation on and off for many years. It's back on.

I doubt that any of the software I see in my industry is written in Ada, there is no real exception handling. Joel is a an exception, they work with high end mass spectrometers and were featured in an Adacore commercial.

If there is a hardware failure of any kind software in this business just locks up silently or there is a non-descriptive error like "instrument error", even when there are multiple instruments networked into a system.

Does this approach sound logical for a first attempt with tasking:

I could write a mostly single threaded application that used tasking for error detection/handling only.

I could queue tasks. One would be called just before calling into a driver. The task would delay for a given amount of time and if the call to the driver blocked unexpectedly the task would reach a point were it will notify the user with a detailed error message. If the driver call did not block another task would be called to signal that the driver call completed on time and the first task would be notified at rendezvous that it was on time and the tasks would queue again and wait for the next driver call.

This may not be a full use of Ada but it would be better then what's currently being used on the market in my industry.

Thanks again-Patrick