Re: Preferred OS, processor family for running embedded Ada?

["Dr. Adrian Wrigley" <amtw@linuxchip.demon.co.uk.uk.uk>]

On Sat, 24 Feb 2007 07:27:01 -0500, Jeffrey Creem wrote:

> Stephen Leake wrote:
> 
>> Someone who can do both Ada and VHDL would be a very valuable person!
>> 
> I'm always surprised that VHDL engineers are not more open to Ada given 
> how close the syntax is. The standard joke where I work is that VHDL is 
> just like Ada except the capslock is always stuck on and comments are 
> apparently forbidden ;)

I came to Ada from VHDL.  When I first encountered VHDL, my first though
was "Wow!  You can say what you mean clearly".  Features like user
defined types (ranges, enumerations, modular types, multi-dimensional
arrays) gave a feeling of clarity and integrity absent from software
development languages.

So when I found that you could get the same benefits of integrity
in software development from a freely available compiler, it didn't
take long to realize what I'd been missing!  Ada is without doubt
the language at the pinnacle of software engineering, and infinitely
preferable to Pascal, C++ or Modula 3 as a first language in teaching.

But I have ever since wondered why the VHDL and Ada communities
are so far apart.  It seems like such a natural partnership for
hardware/software codevelopment.  And there is significant scope
for convergence of language features - fixing the niggling and
unnecessary differences too.  Physical types, reverse ranges,
configurations, architectures, defered constants and ultra-light
concurrency come to mind from VHDL.  And general generics, private types,
tagged types, controlled types from Ada (does the latest VHDL have these?)

Perhaps a common denominator language can be devised which has the
key features of both, with none of the obsolescent features, and
can be translated into either automatically?  Something like this
might allow a "rebranding" of Ada (i.e. a new name, with full buzzword
compliance), and would be ideal to address the "new" paradigm of
multicore/multithreaded processor software, using the lightweight
threading and parallelism absent from Ada as we know it. For those who
know Occam, something like the 'PAR' and "SEQ" constructs are missing in
Ada.

While the obscenities of C-like languages thrive with new additions
seemingly every month, the Pascal family has withered.  Where is
Wirth when you need him?

(don't take it that I dislike C.  Or assembler.  Both have their
legitimate place as low-level languages to get the machine code
you want.  Great for hardware hacking.  Lousy for big teams, complex code)

One can dream...