From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,a3ca574fc2007430 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Thread: 115aec,f41f1f25333fa601 X-Google-Attributes: gid115aec,public From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: Ada and Automotive Industry Date: 1996/11/27 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 201015074 references: <55ea3g$m1j@newsbf02.news.aol.com> <3280DA96.15FB@hso.link.com> <1996Nov6.210957.3070@ole.cdac.com> <5683sk$bsc@news.ccit.arizona.edu> organization: New York University newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.realtime Date: 1996-11-27T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: 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.