Re: advantages or disadvantages of ADA over pascal or modula

[Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com>]

Alfred Hilscher <Alfred.Hilscher@t-online.de> writes:

> Well, nice. But - what do you test, debug, document and so on: Ada or
> C-code?

You test the machine code, of course.

You debug either at the Ada level or the C level -- your choice.  The
Ada compiler can insert #line directives and whatnot into the generated
C code, so that one can set breakpoints on Ada lines and so forth.  It's
not perfect, but it works.  In some cases, you need to understand the
mapping from Ada names to C names, for example (which is fairly
obvious).  On some targets, the debugger has been trained to understand
Ada better.

You document the Ada code.  The C code is just an intermediate language
used by the compiler, and can be ignored by the programmer, except in
some debugging situations.

SofCheck also supports other targets for Ada that do not use C as an
intermediate language.

> Larry Kilgallen schrieb:
> > 
> > In article <3E296128.4183B70A@t-online.de>, Alfred Hilscher <Alfred.Hilscher@t-online.de> writes:
> > 
> > > Assume you have to program a brake control for car, would you do it in
> > > Ada? Then I would like to know which tools you use. The systems I know
> > > are based on microcontrollers HC11/HC12 or 8051. _I_ don't know any
> > > Ada-compiler for these chips. While there are a lot of C develop
> > > environments, there are only very few for Modula, and none for Ada.
> > > Please correct me if I'm wrong.
> > 
> > The SofCheck AdaMagic compiler is available in a form that uses ANSI C
> > as an intermediate language.   Thus any target machine for which you
> > have an ANSI C compiler can be programmed using Ada.  Using this method
> > one automatically takes advantage of whatever peephole optimization the
> > hardware-specific C compiler provides.
> > 
> >         http://www.sofcheck.com

Robert A. Duff
Vice President of Engineering
SofCheck, Inc.