Re: ada and robots

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

<<Joe said
                                                                                
<<As for Ada83 and shared memory, the problem was that the Ada83 compilers      
all believed that only they changed memory, so it was OK to cache data          
items in CPU registers for long periods of time.  For the most part, there      
was no reliable (and portable) way to tell the compiler different, so we        
performed various dances to ensure that Ada83 never knew the whole truth.>>     
                                                                                
                                                                                
Well for items that could be kept in registers, e.g. small scalars, which       
typically corresponds to the need for messing with IO mapped memory, I fail    
to see why the standard feature - pragma Shared - would not be exactly
what you needed. Please explain why pragma Shared did not do the job. if
you were using a compiler that did not implement pragma Shared, then it
was not an Ada 83 compiler, but a compiler for a subset of the language.

<<abstractions are language independent>>

That is nonsense. Languages have HUGE differences in abstraction capabilities.
Anyone who thinks COBOL has the same abtraction capabilities as say, Pascal,
knows NOTHING about either language.