Re: Ada and Automotive Industry

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Robert Eachus asks

"   But most of those chips fall into the 8/16 category.  (I'm thinking
of the 68008, etc.  not their "big" brothers.)  Has Ada ever been
targeted to a machine where the largest registers are 16-bits?  Such a
compiler is possible, but it would be an effort.  (Hmmm.  Doesn't that
describe the Western Digital compiler?  The Russian compiler for the
PDP-11 clone doesn't count, since the address register on most 11s has
22-bits.)"


But you answered your own question earlier, the 8088 is such a chip (largest
register is 16 bits), and yes, Ada was indeed targetted to the 8088 (and
self hosted as well by Alsys, Meridian, RR, and Ada-Ed, all
of which validated in this environment).

However, most likely you mean a case where the addressing space is also
limited to 2**16. But here we have answers as well. All the above compilers
except Ada-Ed could target "smal" mode on an 8088 meeting this criterion,
and also the Alsys Transputer compiler could compile for a 16-bit machine
(there was a problem passing all the Text_IO tests due to space limitations,
but otherwise it was a full language compiler).

I think it would be entirely possible to target the 8-bit chips, given
resources, but at this stage, I think this would be a case of looking
too far backwards on the technology curve, and there would not be a market
for such a product anyway, so the utility of such a product is likely
to remain moot.

Another example of 16-bit targetting is the small versions of the 1750-A,
I expect there are others.