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=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,1a44c40a66c293f3 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news2.google.com!news3.google.com!news4.google.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!newsfeed00.sul.t-online.de!newsfeed01.sul.t-online.de!t-online.de!news-in.ntli.net!newsrout1-win.ntli.net!ntli.net!news.highwinds-media.com!newspeer1-win.ntli.net!newsfe4-gui.ntli.net.POSTED!53ab2750!not-for-mail From: "Dr. Adrian Wrigley" Subject: Re: Preferred OS, processor family for running embedded Ada? User-Agent: Pan/0.14.2 (This is not a psychotic episode. It's a cleansing moment of clarity.) Message-ID: Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada References: <1172192349.419694.274670@k78g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <1172239820.896603.222120@k78g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Date: Sat, 24 Feb 2007 22:10:22 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 82.21.99.109 X-Trace: newsfe4-gui.ntli.net 1172355022 82.21.99.109 (Sat, 24 Feb 2007 22:10:22 GMT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 24 Feb 2007 22:10:22 GMT Organization: NTL Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:9507 Date: 2007-02-24T22:10:22+00:00 List-Id: 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...