Re: Ada and Automotive Industry

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

Richard said

"  Most 8051 programs are still written in assembler. Many are written
  in FORTH.  An 8051 programmer takes advantage of a bunch of Special
  Function Registers (SFR's) and uses these registers according to
  an idiom well-known among those who specialize in writing programs for
  the 8051 architecture.  Many 8051 programmers understand that even
  C is too high-level a language and comparisons of programs written
  in both assembler and C have shown that the corresponding C program
  is often too large for the targeted application and platform.

  Probably not impossible.  But probably not competitive with other
  development languages already in use.  Perhaps someone could develop
  an optimizer that would produce executable code as small and as fast
  as that coded by an experienced 8051 programmer. I doubt it. And small
  and fast are the criteria for a large number of 8051 programs."


Well of course it is impossible to optimize output from C to match assembly
performance, but this is true on any machine (anyone who thinks otherwise
is simply not a sufficiently skillful assembly language programmer -- see
for example as a challenge to anyone disputing this statement, my code for
DASC, a simple parser for Ada 83 that is about 10K bytes long and runs
at several million lines a minute on a medium speed PC.)

But in practice an awful lot of assembly language is NOT written that
competently, and in particular I have often seen perfectly awful
algorithms coded in a furiously optimized manner. You have to remember
that the above argument has been used over time to try to object to the
use of C or other high level languages on any machine, but as time goes
on, people understand that sometimes high reliability is more important
than saving a few bytes. 

Sure I understand a car company is happy to save $1/car for millions of
cars, but that is still not a good deal if the consequence is an
increased risk of catastrophic failure resulting in expensive lawsuits.

Of course a GNAT port to the 8051 (or any other machine), would not be
usable for all applications, but probably it would be usable for some
fraction of them. However, I still don't think there is a market.
Counting the number of projects is not the point, you have to count the
number that might reasonably be persuaded to use Ada. I think that number
is very small.