Re: Ada used in General Aviation (GA) applications?

[Vinzent 'Gadget' Hoefler <nntp-2004-05@t-domaingrabbing.de>]

Bernd Specht wrote:

>Vinzent 'Gadget' Hoefler <nntp-2004-05@t-domaingrabbing.de> wrote in 
>news:bu76a05mpq39k8ouqo56ojgnct6g35ugug@jellix.jlfencey.com:
>
>> Bernd Specht wrote:
>> 
>>>Whats about the time to get familiar with the new language?
>> 
>> Well, that takes longer (just like in C). But it's a parallel process.
>> You can do that while already writing code.
>
>Don't forget, the employees are real C-guys. You can't brainwash them at one 
>afternoon.

True. But that's the two weeks I talked about before. :) Anything else
is learning by doing, damn it's just programming in another language.
(And if the guys are smart and want to deliver working code instead of
doing overtime while spending hours for debugging, this is not a
problem.)

>>>Is it economic to throw away the whole know how?
>> 
>> I still set the same bits in the same register, no matter if I do it
>> in Assembler, C or Ada. But it took me about half a year to understand
>
>Ok, but they write code for accessing a controller register in a few 
>minutes, to write it Ada with all those rep specs they would  need much 
>longer.

Would they? In general? The problem aren't the rep specs. Usually the
programming problem is much higher at some logic level. And Ada helps
there.

And I still don't see where the know how gets lost.

>In our business the first prio is "time to market".

I know, I know. It's all about "time to market". Sometimes it may help
the company to even deliver crap, when they only deliver it early.

But IMO especially in the embedded market this is a bad idea.
Unfortunately I am not running a company of my own, so I can't tell if
you will keep your customers when they get buggy systems but two weeks
earlier. ;-)

>>>Whats about the money for the new tools?
>> 
>> GNAT is free, if you're not relying on professional support.
>
>There is not GNAT for 8051/HC11.

That's where the problem lies. If you can't find an affordable
Ada-compiler for the architecture you are using, you're out of luck.
Sad but true. I can imagine, that you won't convince some hard-core
C-guys to use Ada if that Ada is then converted to C before it
compiles... (I can already hear them crying "But then we can write it
in C ourselves!").

>>>Whats about the money for training?
>> 
>> Some books. They're not *that* expensive. And hey, learning Ada is
>> *fun*!
>
>If you give C-experts a book to learn Ada, then you will get programmers 
>writing C-code in Ada syntax.

IBTD. IMO it mostly depends if they get a grasp on the basic concept
of typing instead of declaring everything as int.

>A real training that they understand _and_ 
>accept that they do not have to use pointers and pointzer arithmetic will 
>take much more than  a book. 

Oh, they can use pointers. But why should they? Parameter modes aren't
that hard to understand and this is a lot of where pointers are needed
in C.

>> (BTW, currently at my company we all here are forced to learn Java,
>> obviously someone seems to think this is a benefit.)
>
>Well, it's not bad to know.

Know thy enemy, yessssir. ;-)

>A big company may live with a few developers on training for weeks (month). 
>A small company has not the financial power to be able to close for some 
>week and have no income (but costs) in that time.

Well, of course. I am always forgetting that I am an Ada enthusiast
and so almost everything I know about Ada I learned in my spare time.
If you have guys who do "it's just my job from nine to five", you
won't get that...

So for me it was easier to decide, I just had to convince my boss that
I will use Ada for that system. And this part was relatively easy, he
doesn't like C either and Java was not a real option.

But *you* would have to convince a couple of developers who probably
never heard anything good about Ada...


Vinzent.

-- 
Wenn alle Stricke reissen, kann man sich immer noch erschiessen.