Re: Standard Queue status

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <9u5ll7$ron$1@nh.pace.co.uk>, Marin David Condic says...
>
>"Stephen Leake" <stephen.a.leake.1@gsfc.nasa.gov> wrote in message
>news:ubshlheoj.fsf@gsfc.nasa.gov...
>>
>> lists must be efficient enough for hard real-time use
>>
>I don't think this was a requirement and would be hard to meet if any sort
>of dynamic allocation is being done. It isn't so much an efficiency issue as
>it is a determinism issue. IIRC, there seemed to be some consensus that a

I believe it was more of a "should" than a "shall" requirement. You clearly
can't entirely get rid of dynamic allocation for an "unbounded" structure. But
what you can do is try to fix it so that once the structure is "set" (no more
deletions, additions, or moves), it can be used without any heap allocations
occuring. If its feasable to do this without violating a "shall" requirement,
there is no good reason to not design it that way.

>> lists must be safe in a multitasking environment
>>
>It would be nice to have a flavor of lists that met this requirement, but I
>think the general feeling was that a) it wasn't needed for v1.0 and b) the
>user could do this for themselves by encasing the list in a protected type.

I believe that is what we got to. However, I do think that at least the routines
themselves should be re-entrant. It should be possible for a user to make things
task-safe by synchronizing all accesses to the same list object. That would give
us the level of safety folks have come to expect from the standard Ada library.

---
T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html

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