Re: Ada and QNX

Re: Ada and QNX

[Armin Steinhoff]

In article <8r1uc0$dve$1@pyrite.mv.net>, "Jeff says...
>
>There is not really a full stable GCC port to QNX available so a GNAT port
>would probably need to finish/clean that up first....

That's probably just your opinion ... you can't have any deeper experiences with
QRTP.

AFAIK ... the gcc sources are not yet available for QRTP, so you can't build
GNAT yet.

>I do not know of any other Ada 95 ports to that OS either.

Really ?  What ports to so called 'fine RTOSes' do you have in mind ??

Regards

Armin

Ada and QNX

[Michal Morawski]

Hi

Does anybody know is it possible to use ADA'95 compiler (e.g. GNAT) in QNX
enviroment.
This question includes debuggers (pdb), run time support etc?

Thank you in advance
Michal Morawski (morawski@zsku.p.lodz.pl)

Re: Ada and QNX

[Jeff Creem]

There is not really a full stable GCC port to QNX available so a GNAT port
would probably
need to finish/clean that up first....

I do not know of any other Ada 95 ports to that OS either. Of course in
these
days of CNN/Time driven Software Tools selection it is clearly just
a matter of time before everyone is using NT/Linux and Java...
But seriously if you are not already using QNX then I think you will have to
look
at one of the many other fine RTOSs for Ada 95.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Michal Morawski" <morawski@zsku.p.lodz.pl>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.os.qnx
Sent: Friday, September 29, 2000 3:53 AM
Subject: Ada and QNX


> Hi
>
> Does anybody know is it possible to use ADA'95 compiler (e.g. GNAT) in QNX
> enviroment.
> This question includes debuggers (pdb), run time support etc?
>
> Thank you in advance
> Michal Morawski (morawski@zsku.p.lodz.pl)
>
>
>

Re: Ada and QNX

[Jeff Creem]

"Armin Steinhoff" <Armin@Steinhoff_de> wrote in message
news:8r25kg0ujl@drn.newsguy.com...
> In article <8r1uc0$dve$1@pyrite.mv.net>, "Jeff says...
> >
> >There is not really a full stable GCC port to QNX available so a GNAT
port
> >would probably need to finish/clean that up first....
>
> That's probably just your opinion ... you can't have any deeper
experiences with
> QRTP.
>

Hmm..Well I admit that I have not specific experience in the area but
my response was based on a search of the GCC archives for QNX info and
then looking at this FAQ (About a year old)

http://www.schoenbrun.com/mba/faq.htm#L48


It save you having to click it says

48) Is GCC available?

GCC is available, at following URL http://www.teaser.fr/~jcmichot/gcc This
release contain GCC 2.7.2 and G++ compiler. You need WatcomC lib & linker to
use this release of gcc.

In general, once developers start using Watcom C/C++, demand for GCC isn't
as high. Watcom provides a very good, high quality C and C++ development
environment.



So, when I say it is not stable what I mean is it is not in the baseline GCC
tree. It is only supported by
an individual and it requires non GNU libs and linkers...I am not saying
this is impossible to get working
now with GNAT but it certainly is likely to raise the bar.


> AFAIK ... the gcc sources are not yet available for QRTP, so you can't
build
> GNAT yet.
>
> >I do not know of any other Ada 95 ports to that OS either.
>
> Really ?  What ports to so called 'fine RTOSes' do you have in mind ??
>


vxWorks (Tornado) has Ada 95 support from ACT (GNAT), Rational, OC Systems,
Green Hills.
LynxOS has Ada 95 support from ACT, Rational and probably others
Not sure of the state of it but RTLinux from Zentropix was working with ACT
for integration of
GNAT into their RTLinux Product.
There is GNAT support for RTEMS.
Concurrent Computer Corp has what appears to be a nice POSIX compliant RT
Unix based OS
with Ada 95 support fully integrated into their tools.

There are many others. We can certainly debate the "fineness" of these other
RTOSs against QNX but
somewhere in the mix I think you will find an OS that certainly competes.

Having said all of that with QNX being now somewhat free it would be cool if
there was a GNAT
port so since it is just my opionion that it would be difficult to do a port
perhaps you could pull
one together. I'd love to start playing with it on monday. Let me know what
time I can download it.

(Sorry...I am just mean at heart)

Re: Ada and QNX

[James Boucher]

I know this is a bit of flamebait, but as an ADA programmer from the
old school...   I love ADA, but it is DEAD. DEAD. DEAD.  My $3000
Alsys ADA compiler suite have been removed for 5 years.  Yes there
are legacy issues and as I have said I loved ADA.  Might I add that
if ADA was to rise from the grave, QNX RTP would be the most
responsive realtime OS to put in on. Most people criticise ADA for
its multitasking overhead.  RTP would keep this to a TRUE minimum.

I would love to see a port of GNAT but it would only be a curiousity.
Not even DOD nor DND use ADA anymore. (In DND, I can only recall
a few LSEC projects (IFCCS?) that used it. All the new projects
were C/C++. Maybe TCCCS had some ADA, I can't recall. If ADA had
Gui/audio constructs it would have beat JAVA as JAVA came many years later.
Oh Well.

Good Luck,
Jim


"Michal Morawski" <morawski@zsku.p.lodz.pl> wrote in message
news:8r1i82$ri3$1@kujawiak.man.lodz.pl...
> Hi
>
> Does anybody know is it possible to use ADA'95 compiler (e.g. GNAT) in QNX
> enviroment.
> This question includes debuggers (pdb), run time support etc?
>
> Thank you in advance
> Michal Morawski (morawski@zsku.p.lodz.pl)
>
>
>

Re: Ada and QNX

[gdemont]

> I know this is a bit of flamebait, but as an ADA programmer from the
> old school...   I love ADA, but it is DEAD. DEAD. DEAD.

I think it is very dependent on the countries and the usage area.
Ada has - fortunately - spread outside its "US-DoD-embedded" context.
It may be sad for the US taxpayers... Anyway, many thanks!
______________________________________________________
Gautier  --  http://members.nbci.com/gdemont/gsoft.htm


Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.

Re: Ada and QNX

[Armin Steinhoff]

In article <8r29q0$q6j$1@pyrite.mv.net>, "Jeff says...
>
>
>"Armin Steinhoff" <Armin@Steinhoff_de> wrote in message
>news:8r25kg0ujl@drn.newsguy.com...
>> In article <8r1uc0$dve$1@pyrite.mv.net>, "Jeff says...
>> >
>> >There is not really a full stable GCC port to QNX available so a GNAT
>> >port would probably need to finish/clean that up first....
>>
>> That's probably just your opinion ... you can't have any deeper
>> experiences with QRTP.
>>
>
>Hmm..Well I admit that I have not specific experience in the area but
>my response was based on a search of the GCC archives for QNX info and
>then looking at this FAQ (About a year old)
>
>http://www.schoenbrun.com/mba/faq.htm#L48

Ahh ... that FAQ is completely useless for QRTP ... it is a FAQ for QNX4 :-)

>It save you having to click it says
>
>48) Is GCC available?
>
>GCC is available, at following URL http://www.teaser.fr/~jcmichot/gcc This
>release contain GCC 2.7.2 and G++ compiler. You need WatcomC lib & linker to
>use this release of gcc.

That gcc is a private port from Jean Michot ... and it is also targeting 
QNX4 :-))

>
>In general, once developers start using Watcom C/C++, demand for GCC isn't
>as high. Watcom provides a very good, high quality C and C++ development
>environment.

Yes ... but Watcom C++ is not available for QRTP!

>So, when I say it is not stable what I mean is it is not in the baseline GCC
>tree. It is only supported by an individual and it requires non GNU libs and
>>linkers...I am not saying this is impossible to get working
>now with GNAT but it certainly is likely to raise the bar.
>
>
>> AFAIK ... the gcc sources are not yet available for QRTP, so you can't
>> build GNAT yet.
>>
>> >I do not know of any other Ada 95 ports to that OS either.
>>
>> Really ?  What ports to so called 'fine RTOSes' do you have in mind ??
>>
>vxWorks (Tornado) has Ada 95 support from ACT (GNAT), Rational, OC Systems,
>Green Hills.
>LynxOS has Ada 95 support from ACT, Rational and probably others
>Not sure of the state of it but RTLinux from Zentropix was working with ACT
>for integration of GNAT into their RTLinux Product.
>There is GNAT support for RTEMS.
>Concurrent Computer Corp has what appears to be a nice POSIX compliant RT
>Unix based OS with Ada 95 support fully integrated into their tools.
>
>There are many others. We can certainly debate the "fineness" of these other
>RTOSs against QNX but somewhere in the mix I think you will find an OS that
>>certainly competes.

Sure ... IMHO Lynx (BlueCat) is direct comparable with QRTP (QNX/Neutrino)

>Having said all of that with QNX being now somewhat free it would be cool if
>there was a GNAT port so since it is just my opionion that it would be
>>difficult to do a port perhaps you could pull one together.

As I mentioned before ... the gcc/qcc sources are not yet available for QRTP.

> I'd love to start playing with it on monday. Let me know what
>time I can download it.

You can download it since several days :-)

Regards

Armin

PS :  Where are the sources of the 'OPEN SOURCE' QRTP ??

Re: Ada and QNX

[Ted Dennison]

James Boucher wrote:

> I know this is a bit of flamebait, but as an ADA programmer from the
> old school...   I love ADA, but it is DEAD. DEAD. DEAD.  My $3000

Can't be too old school, if you never learned how to capitalize it...

--
T.E.D.

Home - mailto:dennison@telepath.com  Work - mailto:dennison@ssd.fsi.com
WWW  - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html  ICQ  - 10545591

Re: Ada and QNX

[Robert Dewar]

In article <V_hB5.59429$dZ2.20181071@news3.rdc1.on.home.com>,
  "James Boucher" <jaboucher@home.com> wrote:
> I know this is a bit of flamebait, but as an ADA programmer
> from the old school...   I love ADA, but it is DEAD. DEAD.
> DEAD.


Well I won't comment specifically on this piece of nonsense,
but I do have a general comment, applicable to Ada folks
as well, that it is remarkable how people are ready to assume
that a technology is dead just because they don't use it
any more.

All the time I meet people

  o  who think Pascal is not used for serious industrial
     projects any more (or perhaps never was).

  o  who think that OS/2 is no longer in use

  o  who think that PL/1 is no longer in use

You even find more ludicrous examples, such as people who
think that COBOL is no longer in use.

When our department at NYU sat down to discuss the PL to use
in the first year course a couple of years ago, I was quite
appalled to hear a professor say that he thought one of the
reasons that we should stop teaching Pascal was that it was
not used commercially. I asked him how he knew, and without
hesitation, he said "well I never encountered it" -- this
was someone with minimal experience with *ANY* real world
software. It is particularly ironic to make this statement
in New York City, where the Metropolitan Transport Authority
has till recently used primarily Pascal for many technical
functions (I say till recently, since the most recent
new contract has switched to the Matra code which is in Ada).

During this same conversation, the argument trotted out in
favor of Java was that it was widely used in industry.

Again, no one actually knew this to be the case (and indeed
examples of successful large scale use of Java are actually
few and far between). But they thought it was, so that was
good enough.

Of course an honest reaction to the bogus argument that one
should teach a widely used language would be that the only
reasonable choices are Visual Basic or COBOL, but I can promise
that virtually all the faculty members around that or any
similar table in the US are (a) quite ignorant about these
two languages and (b) quite sure they want to stay ignorant :-)

Robert Dewar


Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.

Re: Ada and QNX

[DuckE]

I'm sure if you contact sales@gnat.com they'd be more than happy to help you
out, but it may be expensive.

I believe QNX supports a POSIX interface so it may not be difficult to
produce a GNAT port.

I hope this helps,
SteveD


"Michal Morawski" <morawski@zsku.p.lodz.pl> wrote in message
news:8r1i82$ri3$1@kujawiak.man.lodz.pl...
> Hi
>
> Does anybody know is it possible to use ADA'95 compiler (e.g. GNAT) in QNX
> enviroment.
> This question includes debuggers (pdb), run time support etc?
>
> Thank you in advance
> Michal Morawski (morawski@zsku.p.lodz.pl)
>
>
>

Re: Ada and QNX

[Armin Steinhoff]

In article <8r25kg0ujl@drn.newsguy.com>, Armin says...
>
>In article <8r1uc0$dve$1@pyrite.mv.net>, "Jeff says...
>>
>>There is not really a full stable GCC port to QNX available so a GNAT port
>>would probably need to finish/clean that up first....
>
>That's probably just your opinion ... you can't have any deeper experiences
>>with QRTP.
>
>AFAIK ... the gcc sources are not yet available for QRTP, so you can't build
>GNAT yet.

You can build it ... I found out that the gcc sources are available at
     ftp://ftp.qnx.com/usr/free/neutrino/development/gnu :-)

Regards

Armin

Re: Ada and QNX

[ahummmm]

In article <V_hB5.59429$dZ2.20181071@news3.rdc1.on.home.com>,
  "James Boucher" <jaboucher@home.com> wrote:
> I know this is a bit of flamebait, but as an ADA programmer
> from the old school...   I love ADA, but it is DEAD. DEAD.
> DEAD.


Well I won't comment specifically on this piece of nonsense,
but I do have a general comment, applicable to Ada folks
as well, that it is remarkable how people are ready to assume
that a technology is dead just because they don't use it
any more.

All the time I meet people

  o  who think Pascal is not used for serious industrial
     projects any more (or perhaps never was).

  o  who think that OS/2 is no longer in use

Make me laugh !! Lol
Our "up to date" multi trunk corprate NEC 3500 is controlled by OS/2 !!
Keeps all 2500 phones in the biulding up and running, solid as a rock. 

Re: Ada and QNX

[James Boucher]

I am amazed at how people have only replied to the first
"eye catching line".  The rest of this post was my explanation
of the greatness and potential of ADA and why I
was so sad when I and several other who were in
charge of promoting/enforcing the Canadian ADA policy
were forced to abandon our efforts.  I noted that
they pulled this post and left people only to
read the first line which was meant as a joke to
open my disertation on my love for ADA.  By the
way, who pulled the post?
Jim
"ahummmm" <nope@nope.na> wrote in message
news:8FCDFD7EEnopenopena@63.209.170.206...
> In article <V_hB5.59429$dZ2.20181071@news3.rdc1.on.home.com>,
>   "James Boucher" <jaboucher@home.com> wrote:
> > I know this is a bit of flamebait, but as an ADA programmer
> > from the old school...   I love ADA, but it is DEAD. DEAD.
> > DEAD.
>
>
> Well I won't comment specifically on this piece of nonsense,
> but I do have a general comment, applicable to Ada folks
> as well, that it is remarkable how people are ready to assume
> that a technology is dead just because they don't use it
> any more.
>
> All the time I meet people
>
>   o  who think Pascal is not used for serious industrial
>      projects any more (or perhaps never was).
>
>   o  who think that OS/2 is no longer in use
>
> Make me laugh !! Lol
> Our "up to date" multi trunk corprate NEC 3500 is controlled by OS/2 !!
> Keeps all 2500 phones in the biulding up and running, solid as a rock.

Re: Ada and QNX

[Steve Bellenot]

In article <sXeG5.8390$N%1.4346661@news3.rdc1.on.home.com>,
James Boucher <jaboucher@home.com> wrote:
>I am amazed at how people have only replied to the first
>"eye catching line".  The rest of this post was my explanation
>of the greatness and potential of ADA and why I
>was so sad when I and several other who were in
>charge of promoting/enforcing the Canadian ADA policy
>were forced to abandon our efforts.  I noted that
>they pulled this post and left people only to
>read the first line which was meant as a joke to
>open my disertation on my love for ADA.  By the
>way, who pulled the post?
>Jim

My understanding is that Java has given new life to Ada code. That
is there is an Ada to Java `compiler' which takes Ada code and
turns it into Java class files.
-- 
http://www.math.fsu.edu/~bellenot
bellenot <At/> math.fsu.edu 
+1.850.644.7189 (4053fax)

Re: Ada and QNX

[Lao Xiao Hai]

ahummmm wrote:

> In article <V_hB5.59429$dZ2.20181071@news3.rdc1.on.home.com>,
>   "James Boucher" <jaboucher@home.com> wrote:
> > I know this is a bit of flamebait, but as an ADA programmer
> > from the old school...   I love ADA, but it is DEAD. DEAD.
> > DEAD.

From time to time I hear somone say that COBOL is dead.  Yet I spent three
hours today preparing a briefing on COBOL for someone who will present
it to a large corporation's programming staff beginning Monday of this
week.

If a programming language dies in the middle of a forest, will anyone
hear it?   If someone says a programming language is dead often
enough, will it become a self-fulfilling prophecy?  Does the word
"dead" when used to describe the state of a programming language,
preclude the later use of the word, "resurrected" or perhaps, for
those of you with a more mystical bent,  "reincarnated?"   Whatever
you may think, an idea does not disappear so easily from the world
and as long as there are advocates of that idea, it can find its way
back into popularity.

I wonder if the authormeans Ada is obsolete.   If so, his amorous
proclamation may be like that of a long-married spouse slipping over
the brink of a forties crisis.    Those who know Ada realize that it
is far from obsolete.  Those who do not make such pronouncements
out of ignorance.

Some of the alternatives to Ada are more popular.  Some misguided
managers have mistaken popularity for quality and several DoD
contractors have made the error of forsaking Ada in favor of inferior
technologies such as C++.  Does this mean Ada is dead in those
organizations?   Not really.

As people  seek to abandon Ada in favor of the glitzy languages so
popular in Dr. Dobbs discover how dreadful those languages are, they
reconsider the benefits of Ada.   C++, for example, turns out to be just
another pretty face. Even as early as the wedding night, scrubbed of its
makeup, shed of its adornments, the C++ honeymoon can quite suddenly
be over.  Sadly, we continue to see some make decisions for form over
substance.

But "Ada is DEAD?"  Hardly.  It appears that a prodigality of resources
dedicated to opposing technologies was important so those deluded souls
could understand the importance of what they had in the first place.
Now they need to get over buyer's remorse and get back to the solid
capabilities available in Ada.

So, you might want to rethink you use of the adjective, "DEAD."   Then
again,
one could consider the admonition of the poet, John Donne, in "Death Be Not

Proud."

Richard Riehle

Re: Ada and QNX

[Gautier]

Igor Kovalenko:

> Oh, yeah. I bought Ada book some years ago. So many capabilities. Couple
> hundred pages worth of docs printed in small-font. If someone manages to
> a) write a good compiler for that (portable and with runtime-efficient
> code)

Ok, this is done: GNAT.

> and b) somehow teach programmers to understand the whole damn
> thing, then yes it might resurrect. Even then, I have doubts personally.
> Ada is way too high and abstract to be good for system level programming
> (even C++ is too high).

If you can do high and abstract things, it doesn't mean that you can't
do system level programming. Ada provides it, and it is easy.
Maybe you make a confusion with Pascal which doesn't provide it by default.

> And yet it is not as portable and distributable
> as Java to be good for new-age applications. Plus, it smells too much
> like Pascal and that turns me down immediately.

It's a personal taste - nothing to discuss. However C (and decendents)
and Pascal share some archaisms, like the lack of true modularity or
obligation of enclosing every group of more than 1 instruction by
'{','}' (resp. "begin","end" in Pascal).

> Of course, those are
> just my humble personal opinions, I know that others will disagree and I
> don't say that those opinions are absolute right.

> In any case I don't think that pissing into C++ pool will do any good
> for Ada. At best it might just serve you as a good way to kill time
> until a) and b) is done.

Maybe your conditions are more advanced than you think -
and yes, it is a very good way to kill time!

______________________________________________________
Gautier  --  http://members.nbci.com/gdemont/gsoft.htm

Re: Ada and QNX

[Ken Garlington]

"Igor Kovalenko" <kovalenko@home.com> wrote in message
news:39EA9161.6469DDE2@home.com...

[snip]

> Oh, yeah. I bought Ada book some years ago. So many capabilities. Couple
> hundred pages worth of docs printed in small-font.

An odd metric... My copy of "Standard C" by Plauger and Brodie is 207 pages
of fairly small font.

> If someone manages to
> a) write a good compiler for that (portable and with runtime-efficient
> code)

GNAT appears to be fairly portable (at least, it's available on a number of
hosts). Without knowing what the precise definition of "efficient" is in
this context, I can't say if there's a compiler that meets your needs in
that respect. It's certainly been used in hard real-time embedded
environments, which is a pretty good operational definition of "efficient".

> and b) somehow teach programmers to understand the whole damn
> thing, then yes it might resurrect.

I haven't seen any problems in this area in my organization.

> Even then, I have doubts personally.
> Ada is way too high and abstract to be good for system level programming
> (even C++ is too high).

I'm trying to think of a low-level construct available in C, but not Ada,
that would be used for system level programming, and I'm drawing a blank.
Bit-level operations? Pointer manipulation? Interrupt management? I've done
all those in Ada without any difficulty.

> And yet it is not as portable and distributable
> as Java to be good for new-age applications.

Since Ada can run on the JVM, how could it be less portable or
distributable?

> Plus, it smells too much
> like Pascal and that turns me down immediately.

Now I think you're on to something. Too many programmers have the "secret
handshake" syndrome: They want to use languages that are inscrutable to the
unwashed non-programmer.

> Of course, those are
> just my humble personal opinions, I know that others will disagree and I
> don't say that those opinions are absolute right.
>
> In any case I don't think that pissing into C++ pool will do any good
> for Ada. At best it might just serve you as a good way to kill time
> until a) and b) is done.

"a) and b)" are not the problem. Ada's troubles are not technology related.
Ada's troubles come from poor marketing earlier in its history -- too many
vendors making too many mistakes. The worst performers are gone now, but
they left behind bitter feelings in a lot of potential users.

Re: Ada and QNX

[mjsilva]

In article <39EA9161.6469DDE2@home.com>,
  Igor Kovalenko <kovalenko@home.com> wrote:
> Oh, yeah. I bought Ada book some years ago. So many capabilities.
Couple
> hundred pages worth of docs printed in small-font.

You bought -a- book!?  You don't state that you've used Ada, or even
that you know it, but only that you bought -a- book.  And some years
ago at that -- maybe it didn't even cover the current standard (Ada 95
vs. Ada 83).

> If someone manages to
> a) write a good compiler for that (portable and with runtime-efficient
> code)

What evidence do you have that there are no good compilers?  BTW,
compilers aren't portable.  Ada the language, OTOH, allows one to write
very portable code.  And there are compiler implementations that
produce runtime code at least as efficient as equivalent C runtime code.

>...and b) somehow teach programmers to understand the whole damn
> thing,

Since when does one need to know "the whole damn thing" to use any
programming language or other complex tool?

> Ada is way too high and abstract to be good for system level
programming

What low-level system-programming functionality is missing in Ada?  In
fact Ada has more low-level functionality than C or C++.  It was, after
all, originally designed for -embedded- applications.

Mike


Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.

Re: Ada and QNX

[Robert Dewar]

In article <39EB283A.9F7B4F76@motorola.com>,
  Igor Kovalenko <Igor.Kovalenko@motorola.com> wrote:
> Summarizing what you and others replied, it looks like
everything is
> cool with Ada. Just wondering why it is not yet really
resurrected and
> blooming and shining in all its glory.

perhaps because mere technical superiority is not enough.
Remember that the really successful programming languages
in terms of usage (COBOL, Visual Basic, and I guess even
Excel Macro language should count) do not succeed solely
because of technical excellence, but because of historical
factors.

After all Fortran succeeded over Algol-60, and for SURE
that was not a matter of superiority of language. I also
note that Windows-9X succeeded over OS/2, which is even
more surprising.

Technical folks always suppose that technical excellence
is enough to succeed in the market place. I would have
thought that the dominance of Microsoft in the operating
system arena (even in the MS DOS days!) would have perhaps
reminded people that this is not the case, but ....

> Perhaps my personal doubts aren't that personal, huh?

and perhaps they most certainly are, a lot of decisions are
made on the basis of uninformed personal prejudice of the
kind you exhibited.

> Nobody appears to  write an OS in Ada, being so good for
> system level work.

Actually Ada would be an excellent technical choice for writing
an operating system, the reason that the current operating
systems are written in some other language is mostly historical.

> And by the way, many people say that GCC does not generate
> good code for C

Well many people say all sorts of unsupported things (you
demonstrate this principle in your post), but that does not
mean much. How does gcc compare with other compilers? Well
it varies from target to target, it is also pretty hard to
judge in some cases, since many proprietary compilers have
been specialized carefully to the SPEC suite, and this has
not been done for GCC. So you need to be careful what you
are comparing.

Even if you do use the SPEC suite to compare, gcc often does
quite well in the comparison. There are certainly cases where
gcc does better than other compilers, and there are cases
where it does worse, and of course things are a moving target
because gcc is constantly being worked on, and more and more
major development depends on gcc (many large scale C users,
e.g. AOL, at this stage have standardized on the use of gcc,
and large system houses like HP and Sun are definitely paying
attention to gcc performance).

> So I'm kinda
> curious how does GNAT manage to generate good code for such a
more
> complex language as Ada.

It would be easy to satisfy your curiosity, the compiler and
sources are out there.


> Aside from code generation itself, how do they
> manage to implement things like rendesvous in an efficient AND
portable
> way? Such things normally belong to system-dependent runtime
libraries,
> but in Ada they are part of language and having no proof I
nevertheless
> suspect that they are implemented by trading efficiency for
portability.

You suspect wrong, in fact RV is programmed using standard
POSIX primitives that are typically available on all commonly
used systems. Now of course RV is a fairly high level
abstraction, which you use if you want to abstract at this
level. If you want lower level things, then you use them
in Ada (indeed there is nothing to stop you using any
low level system dependent gizmo that you would use in
C if you like).

In general you seem a bit too willing to substitute your
ill-informed guesses for facts.

> It could be that I simply don't know enough and miss
something.

Yup, it could be :-)

> Would be
> glad to be enlightened :)
> - igor

As I say, the sources for GNAT are out there, you are welcome
to work on enlightenment!



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Before you buy.

Re: Ada and QNX

[Gautier]

Igor:

> Summarizing what you and others replied, it looks like everything is
> cool with Ada. Just wondering why it is not yet really resurrected and
> blooming and shining in all its glory.

You should take courses about psychology of the masses...

> Perhaps my personal doubts aren't that personal, huh? Nobody appears to
> write an OS in Ada, being so good for system level work. And by the way,
> many people say that GCC does not generate good code for C,

Who says that ?! Did you play the famous Quake 1 game, it is entirely made
with GCC, including graphics...

> so I'm kinda curious how does GNAT manage to generate good code for
> such a more complex language as Ada.

It doesn't matter. With strong typing, GCC-GNAT knows better what animals
are the variables (not just pointers to something) and optimizes indices,
shifts, registers, inlinings, generics etc. nicely. You can take a look at
my pure-software 3D experiments (see link below).

> Aside from code generation itself, how do they
> manage to implement things like rendesvous in an efficient AND portable
> way? Such things normally belong to system-dependent runtime libraries,
> but in Ada they are part of language and having no proof I nevertheless
> suspect that they are implemented by trading efficiency for portability.

For tasking, I can't tell, but e.g. for exceptions, they don't alter at all
performance: they are well implemented !... Anyway you can see the resulting
assembler code (gcc -S -O2 -gnatpn) for checking what GCC/GNAT does...

____________________________________________________
Gautier  --  http://members.nbci.com/gdemont/e3d.htm

Re: Ada and QNX

[David Starner]

On Mon, 16 Oct 2000 11:09:30 -0500, Igor Kovalenko wrote:
>Perhaps my personal doubts aren't that personal, huh? Nobody appears to
>write an OS in Ada, being so good for system level work. 

Tradition; what the programmers know; popularity; compiler availability - 
all reasons why OSs are implemented in the langauges they are. 

>And by the way,
>many people say that GCC does not generate good code for C, so I'm kinda
>curious how does GNAT manage to generate good code for such a more
>complex language as Ada. 

GCC produces pretty good code. It's not best, but it's not bad code either.
Ada's range constraints can often help the compile produce better code than
a language without range constraints?

As for Ada compilers, I remember a Dr. Dobbs article a few years back,
an interview with Prof. Kahan, who pointed out that the only compiler
to take full advantage of the ix87 stack was one specific Ada compiler.
Like all other compilers, Ada compilers range from the good to the bad.

>Aside from code generation itself, how do they
>manage to implement things like rendesvous in an efficient AND portable
>way? Such things normally belong to system-dependent runtime libraries,
>but in Ada they are part of language and having no proof I nevertheless
>suspect that they are implemented by trading efficiency for portability.

Why would you suspect that? What justifaction would you have to assume that?
It's just like C - you can implement the C library in a portable way, or
an efficent way, and it varies, but most good C implementations are done
the efficent way. Same with Ada.

-- 
David Starner - dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org
http://dvdeug.dhis.org
If you wish to strive for peace of soul then believe; 
if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.
   -- Friedrich Nietzsche

Re: Ada and QNX

[mjsilva]

In article <39EB42B1.A14BDCB6@motorola.com>,
  Igor Kovalenko <Igor.Kovalenko@motorola.com> wrote:
> mjsilva@my-deja.com wrote:
> >
> > In article <39EA9161.6469DDE2@home.com>,
> >   Igor Kovalenko <kovalenko@home.com> wrote:
> > > Oh, yeah. I bought Ada book some years ago. So many capabilities.
> > Couple
> > > hundred pages worth of docs printed in small-font.
> >
> > You bought -a- book!?  You don't state that you've used Ada, or even
> > that you know it, but only that you bought -a- book.  And some years
> > ago at that -- maybe it didn't even cover the current standard (Ada
95
> > vs. Ada 83).
> >
>
> Sure, I bought a book simply to have it collect some dust. That's very
> reasonable assumption given that such fat books are usually rather
> expensive.

I've got plenty of books collecting dust.  I didn't buy them for that
purpose, but that's the end result anyway.  Rather than rely on
readers' assumptions why not be more clear in your writing?
>
> > Since when does one need to know "the whole damn thing" to use any
> > programming language or other complex tool?
> >
>
> Since the time it became obvious that if you don't want the whole Ada
> you might as well go with C/C++.

When it comes to e.g. C++ do you feel equally compelled to know "the
whole damn thing"?
>
> > > Ada is way too high and abstract to be good for system level
> > programming
> >
> > What low-level system-programming functionality is missing in Ada?
In
> > fact Ada has more low-level functionality than C or C++.  It was,
after
> > all, originally designed for -embedded- applications.
> >
>
> I did not say anything is missing. I said that it is 'too high' which
> should mean there is just too much stuff to bear along with what you
> really need in most cases.

OK, what 'too high' stuff must you bear in order to do system-level
programming in Ada?
>
> Note that strictly speaking I never said Ada is wrong thing in
general,
> I just stated that it is not good for my personal taste. My original
> intention was not to denounce Ada, but to say that pissing on C++ does
> not do any good for Ada. I see, nobody seems to want to continue the
> wedding analogy, but many are happy to let off some steam on me no
> matter how many disclaimers I put. I guess it was mistake to give you
> guys such an easy target :)

If you'd like to have a serious discussion on the relative merits of
C++ and Ada I'm sure this group can rise to the occasion.  Informed
criticism, BTW, is not the same as "pissing".

Mike


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Before you buy.

Re: Ada and QNX

[Armin Steinhoff]

Hi Igor,

In article <39EB283A.9F7B4F76@motorola.com>, Igor says...
>
>Summarizing what you and others replied, it looks like everything is
>cool with Ada. Just wondering why it is not yet really resurrected and
>blooming and shining in all its glory.
>
>Perhaps my personal doubts aren't that personal, huh? Nobody appears to
>write an OS in Ada, being so good for system level work.

I deed a lot of system level work ( file control processor of a PBX computer
system) with the language CHILL. It is very similar to ADA because CHILL
inherited a lot of ADA contructs ... so I can imagine to do the same work in
ADA.

>And by the way, many people say that GCC does not generate good code for C, so
>>I'm kinda curious how does GNAT manage to generate good code for such a more
>complex language as Ada. Aside from code generation itself, how do they
>manage to implement things like rendesvous in an efficient

BTW the rendesvous based IPC of ADA is 99,9% similar to the QNX IPC ... so
QNX seems to be the perfect platform for an ADA runtime environment :-) 

>AND portable way?

Where is the problem? The implementations might be different ... but not the 
validated interface to the runtime environment of ADA. 

> Such things normally belong to system-dependent runtime libraries,
>but in Ada they are part of language

... not of the language, it's part of the runtime environment and that 'can' be
build on top of a RTOS.

> and having no proof I nevertheless
>suspect that they are implemented by trading efficiency for portability.

I can't see why an ADA application should not be portable at source code level 
between validated ADA compilers and runtime environments ... 

>It could be that I simply don't know enough and miss something. Would be
>glad to be enlightened :)

Hope someone could do the GNAT port to QNX RTP for you ... so you could play a
little bit with ADA ;-)

ADA was created to support huge software projects ... so it contains a lot of
paradigms which makes our life easier.

Armin

BTW ... the biggest disadvantage with ADA is(was) the puristic validation
process (defined for by the DoD and used often as a competitiv wappen against
non US implementations. Just my OBSERVATION ... years ago.)

Re: Ada and QNX

[Marin David Condic]

Igor Kovalenko wrote:

> Oh, yeah. I bought Ada book some years ago. So many capabilities. Couple
> hundred pages worth of docs printed in small-font. If someone manages to
> a) write a good compiler for that (portable and with runtime-efficient
> code) and b) somehow teach programmers to understand the whole damn
> thing, then yes it might resurrect. Even then, I have doubts personally.

A) There *are* good quality compilers for Ada for lots of platforms.
B) Nobody needs to know "the whole damn thing" in order to do useful work with
it. (I doubt anybody knows *all* of C, Cobol, Java, Lisp, etc. since you
seldom need *all* of a language to get a job done.)

>
> Ada is way too high and abstract to be good for system level programming
> (even C++ is too high). And yet it is not as portable and distributable

I've heard this old saw so often I just want to cry. Would you accept as
"system level programming" a jet engine control system functioning in a
hard-realtime setting where there is *no* OS except for that which you write
yourself? As in "I'm programming down at the bare metal, building my own
interrupt handlers, low-level device I/O, etc."? Chances are, you've flown in
a jet with such an engine control. Yes, it's really been done a number of
times. There are a lot more examples, but these I can testify to in court
since I developed them. Can we *please* never again hear that "Ada is no good
for systems programming"?

>
> as Java to be good for new-age applications. Plus, it smells too much
> like Pascal and that turns me down immediately. Of course, those are
> just my humble personal opinions, I know that others will disagree and I
> don't say that those opinions are absolute right.
>

You're never wrong about what you "like" or "prefer". You don't have to like
Ada. I don't have to like C. However, I'll concede that C has its place in the
world an often has either technical or business merits that make it the right
choice for some applications. I would like people to look at Ada in a serious
technical way with an eye toward trying to recognize its strengths & an honest
effort to look for where it would be useful. All too often, people begin their
inspection of Ada with an attitude of: "I *hate* Ada. Now let me learn enough
about it to find or invent reasons why hating Ada is the right answer." This
is a very human action. We all do it from time to time. But like many human
actions, it is not terribly useful or constructive.

>
> In any case I don't think that pissing into C++ pool will do any good
> for Ada. At best it might just serve you as a good way to kill time
> until a) and b) is done.
>

A and B are done. See http://www.Adapower.com/ for sources for good quality
compilers and a bibliography of good books for learning Ada. (Either *all* of
it or just the parts you need to do your job.) I personally like Bard
Crawford's book (see: www.LearnAda.com.) as a "quick" introduction to the
language for those who need to get familiar with the basic features of the
language without becoming a language lawyer. See also:
http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~mfeldman/ada95books.html#1 for more books about Ada.

MDC
--
======================================================================
Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ q u a d r u s c o r p . c o m
Visit my web site at:  http://www.mcondic.com/

    "Giving money and power to Government is like giving whiskey
    and car keys to teenage boys."

        --   P. J. O'Rourke
======================================================================

Re: Ada and QNX

[Igor Kovalenko]

Summarizing what you and others replied, it looks like everything is
cool with Ada. Just wondering why it is not yet really resurrected and
blooming and shining in all its glory.

Perhaps my personal doubts aren't that personal, huh? Nobody appears to
write an OS in Ada, being so good for system level work. And by the way,
many people say that GCC does not generate good code for C, so I'm kinda
curious how does GNAT manage to generate good code for such a more
complex language as Ada. Aside from code generation itself, how do they
manage to implement things like rendesvous in an efficient AND portable
way? Such things normally belong to system-dependent runtime libraries,
but in Ada they are part of language and having no proof I nevertheless
suspect that they are implemented by trading efficiency for portability.

It could be that I simply don't know enough and miss something. Would be
glad to be enlightened :)
- igor

Marin David Condic wrote:
> 
> Igor Kovalenko wrote:
> 
> > Oh, yeah. I bought Ada book some years ago. So many capabilities. Couple
> > hundred pages worth of docs printed in small-font. If someone manages to
> > a) write a good compiler for that (portable and with runtime-efficient
> > code) and b) somehow teach programmers to understand the whole damn
> > thing, then yes it might resurrect. Even then, I have doubts personally.
> 
> A) There *are* good quality compilers for Ada for lots of platforms.
> B) Nobody needs to know "the whole damn thing" in order to do useful work with
> it. (I doubt anybody knows *all* of C, Cobol, Java, Lisp, etc. since you
> seldom need *all* of a language to get a job done.)
> 
> >
> > Ada is way too high and abstract to be good for system level programming
> > (even C++ is too high). And yet it is not as portable and distributable
> 
> I've heard this old saw so often I just want to cry. Would you accept as
> "system level programming" a jet engine control system functioning in a
> hard-realtime setting where there is *no* OS except for that which you write
> yourself? As in "I'm programming down at the bare metal, building my own
> interrupt handlers, low-level device I/O, etc."? Chances are, you've flown in
> a jet with such an engine control. Yes, it's really been done a number of
> times. There are a lot more examples, but these I can testify to in court
> since I developed them. Can we *please* never again hear that "Ada is no good
> for systems programming"?
> 
> >
> > as Java to be good for new-age applications. Plus, it smells too much
> > like Pascal and that turns me down immediately. Of course, those are
> > just my humble personal opinions, I know that others will disagree and I
> > don't say that those opinions are absolute right.
> >
> 
> You're never wrong about what you "like" or "prefer". You don't have to like
> Ada. I don't have to like C. However, I'll concede that C has its place in the
> world an often has either technical or business merits that make it the right
> choice for some applications. I would like people to look at Ada in a serious
> technical way with an eye toward trying to recognize its strengths & an honest
> effort to look for where it would be useful. All too often, people begin their
> inspection of Ada with an attitude of: "I *hate* Ada. Now let me learn enough
> about it to find or invent reasons why hating Ada is the right answer." This
> is a very human action. We all do it from time to time. But like many human
> actions, it is not terribly useful or constructive.
> 
> >
> > In any case I don't think that pissing into C++ pool will do any good
> > for Ada. At best it might just serve you as a good way to kill time
> > until a) and b) is done.
> >
> 
> A and B are done. See http://www.Adapower.com/ for sources for good quality
> compilers and a bibliography of good books for learning Ada. (Either *all* of
> it or just the parts you need to do your job.) I personally like Bard
> Crawford's book (see: www.LearnAda.com.) as a "quick" introduction to the
> language for those who need to get familiar with the basic features of the
> language without becoming a language lawyer. See also:
> http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~mfeldman/ada95books.html#1 for more books about Ada.
> 
> MDC
> --
> ======================================================================
> Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
> Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ q u a d r u s c o r p . c o m
> Visit my web site at:  http://www.mcondic.com/
> 
>     "Giving money and power to Government is like giving whiskey
>     and car keys to teenage boys."
> 
>         --   P. J. O'Rourke
> ======================================================================

Re: Ada and QNX

[Igor Kovalenko]

mjsilva@my-deja.com wrote:
> 
> In article <39EA9161.6469DDE2@home.com>,
>   Igor Kovalenko <kovalenko@home.com> wrote:
> > Oh, yeah. I bought Ada book some years ago. So many capabilities.
> Couple
> > hundred pages worth of docs printed in small-font.
> 
> You bought -a- book!?  You don't state that you've used Ada, or even
> that you know it, but only that you bought -a- book.  And some years
> ago at that -- maybe it didn't even cover the current standard (Ada 95
> vs. Ada 83).
> 

Sure, I bought a book simply to have it collect some dust. That's very
reasonable assumption given that such fat books are usually rather
expensive.

> Since when does one need to know "the whole damn thing" to use any
> programming language or other complex tool?
> 

Since the time it became obvious that if you don't want the whole Ada
you might as well go with C/C++.

> > Ada is way too high and abstract to be good for system level
> programming
> 
> What low-level system-programming functionality is missing in Ada?  In
> fact Ada has more low-level functionality than C or C++.  It was, after
> all, originally designed for -embedded- applications.
> 

I did not say anything is missing. I said that it is 'too high' which
should mean there is just too much stuff to bear along with what you
really need in most cases.

Note that strictly speaking I never said Ada is wrong thing in general,
I just stated that it is not good for my personal taste. My original
intention was not to denounce Ada, but to say that pissing on C++ does
not do any good for Ada. I see, nobody seems to want to continue the
wedding analogy, but many are happy to let off some steam on me no
matter how many disclaimers I put. I guess it was mistake to give you
guys such an easy target :)

- Igor

Re: Ada and QNX

[Marin David Condic]

Igor Kovalenko wrote:

> Summarizing what you and others replied, it looks like everything is
> cool with Ada. Just wondering why it is not yet really resurrected and
> blooming and shining in all its glory.
>

To use an analogy that's been used before: Which is better? Sony's Beta format or
VHS? From most technical standpoints, Beta was a better format. Why didn't it catch
on? A thousand reasons can be given, but few will be based on some sort of
"Technical Superiority" of VHS.

I suppose a lot of C programmers don't like Ada because it is strict, disciplined
and not as amenable to "clever tricks". I suppose the biggest reason is that Ada is
simply not C and people like what they know and hate what they don't know. Since C
got out there first and proliferated all over God's Green Acres via Unix, there are
a lot of C programmers and they just aren't going to automatically "like" something
that is not C or at least C-ish.

>
> Perhaps my personal doubts aren't that personal, huh? Nobody appears to
> write an OS in Ada, being so good for system level work. And by the way,

Lots of people have doubts. I don't know many people with reasonable levels of
familiarity and experience with Ada who have doubts about the language. Maybe they
doubt its usefulness within a specific problem domain or a specific application
because experience shows that some other way works better. Example: The kinds of
things one might do with a shell script are not the sort of things Ada (or most
other compiled languages) are as well suited for.

As far as OS work goes, I think we ought to be clear about what we mean when we say
"Operating System" or Systems Programming. There are lots of things I would consider
to be an "Operating System" that have been written in Ada. Its a very good language
for getting down to the bare metal as needed and provides the kinds of features that
make building things like schedulers, interrupt handlers, DMA and port I/O access,
etc. easy to do. The fact that Unix, Windows, OS/2 and maybe a few other "major"
general purpose operating systems are not written in Ada hardly constitutes "proof"
that you *can't* write something similar in Ada. It just demonstrates that the
people responsible for picking the language for those operating systems didn't
choose Ada. The reasons are largely non-technical - reasons like "Ada doesn't exist
yet" or "I like C".

You could write such an operating system in Ada. There is a group of folks off
attempting to do just that - mostly as a labor of love. See: http://www.AdaOS.org/
and find out what they are up to. (Personally, I'd name the OS "Quixote" - but
that's my sense of humor at work. :-)

>
> many people say that GCC does not generate good code for C, so I'm kinda
> curious how does GNAT manage to generate good code for such a more
> complex language as Ada. Aside from code generation itself, how do they

Remember that GNAT is not the only Ada compiler on the planet. I don't have any
reason to believe that GNAT is particularly bad at code generation. It certainly
makes pretty fast code for most "general purpose" kinds of programming tasks. Is it
as highly optimizing as some other compilers? Don't know. Never did a comparison
with GNAT to other things because I've not had cause to look at that compiler for
purposes of an embedded application. However, I've used other Ada compilers for
embedded, hard-realtime applications and found the code generation to be very
excellent.

The problem with this sort of thing is that the question is just too fuzzy. There's
"Ada-The-Language" and there's "Ada-The-Implementation". Some early implementations
of Ada were excruciatingly bad - thus all the "Ada-Is-Slow-As-Commanded-By-God"
sorts of misinformation that flows from those who either don't know Ada or don't
know much about computer languages and compilers. (You never get a second chance to
make a good first impression. :-) As people began to understand the language and
what it would take to compile it, two things happened: Ada got fast and compiler
technology got better. There is nothing inherent about Ada that guarantees it
*can't* be compiled to fast code. You do have to know the language to use it
efficiently - just as you would need to know C or Fortran to use it efficiently.
There certainly isn't anything in Ada to stop you from writing bad code if you don't
know what you are doing. Same goes for C or any other language you care to name.

Another problem is the question: "Fast at what?" Benchmarking compilers is an
extremely tricky business and as anyone who has ever done it can tell you, you have
to pick benchmarks that represent the kind of things you intend to do. There is just
no way to make a blanket statement that "Compiler A Sucks" without asking the
question "Sucks At Doing What?" You can't lay out a broad category like "Sucks At
Making Operating System Code" because that covers way too much territory to be of
any use. Does it suck at making efficient code for floating point linear
computations? Does it suck at making code to move things around in memory? Does it
suck at optimizing away hundreds of really small procedures? Seldom will a compiler
for any language generate really tight code for all kinds of computations and it
isn't often that a compiler will be horrible at *everything* it attempts to compile.

>
> manage to implement things like rendesvous in an efficient AND portable
> way? Such things normally belong to system-dependent runtime libraries,
> but in Ada they are part of language and having no proof I nevertheless
> suspect that they are implemented by trading efficiency for portability.
>

Portable in what sense? At the source code level, the standard requires specific
behavior that for one target may be easy to implement efficiently and for another
target may be difficult to make efficient. Portability at the object code level?
That's a real can of worms. Is a rendezvous an inherently expensive operation? It
depends. They *can* be costly depending on what you are doing, but the argument in
their favor is that of semantic content. For example, it costs more to do a
rendezvous that passes parameters than it does to simply synchronize - but go ahead
and don't pass parameters and you may find you have to resort to all sorts of other
tricks to keep your data from getting whacked in the head, so you spent as much time
or more "rolling your own" as you would have by just letting the compiler take care
of it for you.

In my engine control experience, there used to be a wide spread belief that fixed
point math was faster than floating point math - given the presence of native
floating point math on the processor. In one sense, this was true. Adding two fixed
point numbers would happen in fewer clock cycles than two floating point numbers.
But we did a study that ended up concluding that it was a wash. By the time you got
done doing the work needed to handle all the scalings and so on, you added about as
much workload as you saved. We went to floating point as a result and wached our
error rates plument in the process. In other words, we invested some processor time
in floating point and reaped a profit. I'd think you could look at things like the
rendezvous in the same light.

You have to understand what you're doing with parallel programming and understand
the best way to get what you want out of it. Its not profitable to look at one
mechanism in the language, declare it inefficient or non-portable and be done with
it. The question has to be how best to accomplish the job and look at the features
you have to get it done. If all you want to do is spawn a subprocess that will work
independent of the main process - maybe the best way is with an OS call - or maybe
you should use a task with no rendezvous. What is the cost of each? Is it
significantly different? Will you end up putting a lot of spackle around the OS call
to compensate for the things you *don't* get because it isn't a task? Or maybe
they're identical in implementation? You can't tell until you pop the hood and take
a look. BTW: Ada will let you do either.

>
> It could be that I simply don't know enough and miss something. Would be
> glad to be enlightened :)
>

Well, I hope that you'd not take the "defensiveness" we Ada-ites sometimes exhibit
as reason to abandon any investigation. We get that way because we often find Ada
criticized unfairly because someone heard some rumor or inuendo that has no basis in
fact and it upsets us to see what we know to be a useful language getting bashed
that way. If you take the time to learn the language and build some non-trivial
software with it, I'd bet you would find it has some very useful and unique
qualities that could be helpful in developing things you may be involved in. You may
still end up liking C better than Ada, but remember that the two languages had
entirely different design requirements. Learning Ada might just improve some things
about the way you program in C.

MDC
--
======================================================================
Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ q u a d r u s c o r p . c o m
Visit my web site at:  http://www.mcondic.com/

    "Giving money and power to Government is like giving whiskey
    and car keys to teenage boys."

        --   P. J. O'Rourke
======================================================================

Re: Ada and QNX

[Lao Xiao Hai]

Igor Kovalenko wrote:

> Note that strictly speaking I never said Ada is wrong thing in general,
> I just stated that it is not good for my personal taste. My original
> intention was not to denounce Ada, but to say that pissing on C++ does
> not do any good for Ada. I see, nobody seems to want to continue the
> wedding analogy, but many are happy to let off some steam on me no
> matter how many disclaimers I put. I guess it was mistake to give you
> guys such an easy target :)

Eezveneetye paizhalsta, Igor.

"You are not the target"

It is not you who is the easy target, but C++.   Also,  as for using it as a
receptacle relieving for bladder content, you may be correct that I was not
entirely fair in my earlier posting.   It does bring a certain amount of
perverse glee, though.

We all have our opinions based on our own experiences.   For me, C++ is
the peanut brittle of programmig languages.  Peanut brittle is easy to break
apart,  gets stuck between your teeth, and causes tooth  decay.  While a
few C++ programmers may practice good software hygiene, it seems
most do not.  Consequently, most of the C++ code I see is reminiscent
of the aforementioned peanut brittle.

On the positive side, C++ used intelligently, can be engaged in the creation
of relatively good software.   I have actually witnessed this.
Unfortunately,
this seems to be the exception rather than the rule.    IMHO, if the software

really must work properly all the time,  Ada is better choice.

To decide that Ada is bad because it looks too much like Pascal is a bit
short-sighted.   Of course, syntax does make a difference and we all
have our preferences in that regard.   However, it seems to me we should
be making the decision on the basis of quality and reliability of our end
product  rather than on the popularity of, or the pulchritude of the language

tools. When considered in that context, I have to choose Ada, even though
I personally like Smalltalk and Eiffel.

Richard Riehle

Re: Ada and QNX

[Igor Kovalenko]

Lao Xiao Hai wrote:
> 
> Some of the alternatives to Ada are more popular.  Some misguided
> managers have mistaken popularity for quality and several DoD
> contractors have made the error of forsaking Ada in favor of inferior
> technologies such as C++.  Does this mean Ada is dead in those
> organizations?   Not really.
> 
> As people  seek to abandon Ada in favor of the glitzy languages so
> popular in Dr. Dobbs discover how dreadful those languages are, they
> reconsider the benefits of Ada.   C++, for example, turns out to be just
> another pretty face. Even as early as the wedding night, scrubbed of its
> makeup, shed of its adornments, the C++ honeymoon can quite suddenly
> be over.  Sadly, we continue to see some make decisions for form over
> substance.
> 

To contuinue the analogy, it sounds pretty much like a rant of a left
woman about how foolish her guy was to marry another woman, because her
breasts are fake and most of her face is a surgeons's talent. Those
rants never bring the guy back, because if he's left then it was for a
good reason. He probably did not like her enough with all her real good
amenities.

> But "Ada is DEAD?"  Hardly.  It appears that a prodigality of resources
> dedicated to opposing technologies was important so those deluded souls
> could understand the importance of what they had in the first place.
> Now they need to get over buyer's remorse and get back to the solid
> capabilities available in Ada.
> 

Oh, yeah. I bought Ada book some years ago. So many capabilities. Couple
hundred pages worth of docs printed in small-font. If someone manages to
a) write a good compiler for that (portable and with runtime-efficient
code) and b) somehow teach programmers to understand the whole damn
thing, then yes it might resurrect. Even then, I have doubts personally.
Ada is way too high and abstract to be good for system level programming
(even C++ is too high). And yet it is not as portable and distributable
as Java to be good for new-age applications. Plus, it smells too much
like Pascal and that turns me down immediately. Of course, those are
just my humble personal opinions, I know that others will disagree and I
don't say that those opinions are absolute right.

In any case I don't think that pissing into C++ pool will do any good
for Ada. At best it might just serve you as a good way to kill time
until a) and b) is done.

- Igor

Re: Ada and QNX

[Armin Steinhoff]

In article <8sg6g2$eur$1@nnrp1.deja.com>, Robert says...
>
>In article <39EB662D.F2C8B55B@acm.org>,
>  Marin David Condic <mcondic.nospam@acm.org> wrote:
>

[ clip ... ]

>What arguments would impress management. Well try this on
>for size "Ada will help you achieve level 3 CMM more rapidly
>and realiably". I suspect this is definitely true, and I could
>(and have) written papers to support this, but I would be
>interested in other people's viewpoints. 

ADA is in the meantime based on a IEC standard ... but who is controlling
the validation rules ??  I can only find an IEC paper for the issue
'Conformity assessment of a language processor', 25 pages. It is from 1999!!

I wonder when will the validation games are over??  =:-/ 

Armin

Re: Ada and QNX

[David C. Hoos, Sr.]

Igor Kovalenko <kovalenko@home.com> wrote in message
news:39EBE584.FC6504CA@home.com...
> Robert Dewar wrote:
> > perhaps because mere technical superiority is not enough.
<snip>
> > > And by the way, many people say that GCC does not generate
> > > good code for C
> >
> > Well many people say all sorts of unsupported things (you
> > demonstrate this principle in your post)
>
> You could not fail to mention that, could you? Which exactly unsupported
> thing did _I_ say AND claimed it to be anything but matter of my
> personal taste? I do not share the view of those who denounces GCC. I
> said 'some people say' merely to point to simple fact that there are
> such people. Based on that I asked how people can so easily claim GNAT
> to be efficient given that the language places a lot more burden onto
> compiler. I did not say it is impossible for GNAT to be good but I said
> that it probably trades efficiency of code for portability (by which I
> mean ability of compiler to generate code for different
> architectures/OSes).
<snip>
You did say "And by the way, many people say that GCC does not generate
good code for C" in your earlier post, then when defending the statement
you quoted yourself "I said 'some people say' merely to point.."

There's quite a difference between "many" and "some."  That "some" say
it I have no doubt, but that "many" say it, I don't believe can be
supported.

By the way, the gcc compilers basically have a common front end for
each language producing a common intermediate language, and then
a back end specific to the architecture/OS.  Thus, a single compiler
does _not_ "generate code for different architectures/OSes," so there's
no need to "trade efficiency of code for portability" as you suggest.

Re: Ada and QNX

[Larry Kilgallen]

In article <8sg6g2$eur$1@nnrp1.deja.com>, Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> writes:

> I actually think this error is made in HDTV today, for most
> people resolution is not that important. Speaking as someone
> with high end HDTV equipment, I will say that most people
> don't really care about the difference between DVD (480p)
> and HDTV (720p or 1050i). The wide screen is important, but
> in my view the practice that is appearing of broadcasting
> 16 x 9 material in 1050i is a mistake, it would be better
> to broadcast more channels at 480p.

Obviously you and I differ regarding how well they do at filling
the existing channels and how more channels might affect that,
but continuing that line would be quite off topic.

> Why is this relevant to comp.lang.ada? Well a lot of our
> discussion and support of Ada is based on alledged technical
> superiority, I say alledged because it is not so easy to prove
> superiority in this field. What we need to be sure of is that
> the factors that we stress are indeed those that are important
> and real.

A good point, rarely considered here.  It needs a buzz-word :-)

> I recently saw someone say in an influential list on Ada that
> they thought that the fact that Ada had a better defined
> standard was a crucial element to Ada's success. My own feeling
> is that even if this were true (it is not!) then it would not
> be terribly important, and if we concentrated on that aspect
> to the exclusion of others, we would definitely be making the
> beta mistake, and even if we DID achieve a better defined
> standard, it is not what would impress the real world.

I would say that Ada has a more widely accepted standard than
many of the alternatives.  The absolute number of Pascal compilers
that attempt to implement the full Extended Pascal standard seems
to be about 2.  Certainly the percentage is frightening. I tried
some conversion software to regularly transform Pascal code from
one dialect to another, and it was a burdensome experience.

> What arguments would impress management. Well try this on
> for size "Ada will help you achieve level 3 CMM more rapidly
> and realiably". I suspect this is definitely true, and I could
> (and have) written papers to support this, but I would be
> interested in other people's viewpoints. There's a tecnical
> advantage that definitely WOULD play in some circles.

But in other circles the only possible technical advantage that
could play is "time to market".  I believe for the slight change
of "time to market with a defect rate less than X" could be won
by Ada for suitably small X.  Not all circles will care, but some
will care who do not care about CMM.

Re: Ada and QNX

[Ted Dennison]

In article <8sg6g2$eur$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> In article <39EB662D.F2C8B55B@acm.org>,
>   Marin David Condic <mcondic.nospam@acm.org> wrote:
>
> > To use an analogy that's been used before: Which is better?
>
> > Sony's Beta format or VHS? From most technical standpoints, Beta was
> > a better format. Why didn't it catch on? A thousand reasons can be
> > given, but few will be based on some sort of
> > "Technical Superiority" of VHS.
>
> Yes, Beta had better picture quality, but that was NOT the
> important technical feature, the dominating technical feature
> was the maximum recording time, and VHS got ahead there so
> significantly that Beta could not catch up.

That is indeed a good example of a technical argument for VHS. However,
I think a far more convincing argument in VHS's favor was that it was an
open format, whereas Beta was closly held by one company. When in
direct competition with an open platform, proprietary formats
typically don't stand a chance. The field of history is strewn with the
rotting corpses of "technically superior" proprietary products that
tried to take on open standards. I'm sure everyone here could name a
score such examples in the fields of computer hardware (lost out to the
open PC standard) and OS (lost out to the relativly open Unix standard)
fields alone. One could argue that the only reason the closed Windows OS
made it this far is that it piggybacked on the dominant open computer
standard (the PC). A particularly bold person could further argue that,
given that an reasonably comparable open OS for the PC is now available,
Windows is now doomed. That is exactly the argument being made in the
essay at http://muq.org/~cynbe/rants/lastdino.htm .

> I recently saw someone say in an influential list on Ada that
> they thought that the fact that Ada had a better defined
> standard was a crucial element to Ada's success. My own feeling
> is that even if this were true (it is not!) then it would not
> be terribly important, and if we concentrated on that aspect

I'd actually say that person was onto something. The Ada standard is one
of the few that is freely avaialable on the web for anyone to read. It
is also one of the few language standards with any kind of teeth to it.
Ada users *expect* to be able to take their code to any other Ada
compiler and have it compile and even behave the same way when run. That
means an Ada user is not nearly as tied to their compiler vendor after a
large amount of code is written. That may prove more important to Ada's
success than any of the "if you could only have one feature" thread
answers.

There's also the issue of protection from OS implementation issues. Most
other languages require their users to go to the OS to do anything
serious. Ada has things like tasking and intertask communications and
synchronization in the language itself. Thus an Ada user is not nearly
as tied to their OS as users of most other languages (even Java in some
cases). So I can write something as complicated as a real-time
scheduler, and move my code to another OS and compiler without changing
a single line of code. (This is not hypotheical. We actually did this!)

So Ada in many ways is a more "open" language standard than any other.
This is the leverage I think it would be wisest to use in proselytizing
the language to the world at large. The "technical superiority"
arguments should still be thrown in as background info, to give
technical folks good fodder for rationalizing their choice. But the
emphasis should be on the open-ness of the language.

--
T.E.D.

http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html


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Re: Ada and QNX

[mjsilva]

In article <39EA6305.CD5CFE1F@ix.netcom.com>,
  Lao Xiao Hai <laoxhai@ix.netcom.com> wrote:

> As people  seek to abandon Ada in favor of the glitzy languages so
> popular in Dr. Dobbs discover how dreadful those languages are, they
> reconsider the benefits of Ada.

Is anyone aware of instances of "buyer's remorse" after switching from
Ada to Brand X?

BTW, it's looking like my efforts at convincing our industrial
controller customer to go with Ada rather than C or C++ may pay off...

Mike


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Re: Ada and QNX

[Steffen Huber]

[comp.os.qnx deleted from Newsgroup list]
In article <8sg6g2$eur$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> In article <39EB662D.F2C8B55B@acm.org>,
>   Marin David Condic <mcondic.nospam@acm.org> wrote:
>
> > To use an analogy that's been used before: Which is better?
> > Sony's Beta format or VHS? From most technical standpoints,
> > Beta was a better format. Why didn't it catch on? A thousand
> > reasons can be given, but few will be based on some sort of
> > "Technical Superiority" of VHS.
>
> I know this is off topic,

I know, too, but it is just interesting that so many people cite the
"Beta vs. VHS" example - look at the comp.sys.acorn.* hierarchy to
find even more arguments ;-)

> but in fact I think the above is
> an example of myth, and exposes an interesting failure of
> many technical folks, which is that they do not understand
> what are and are not important technical characteristics.

I don't think the race between the different home video formats
was influenced by technical characteristics, at least not in a major
way.

> Yes, Beta had better picture quality, but that was NOT the
> important technical feature, the dominating technical feature
> was the maximum recording time, and VHS got ahead there so
> significantly that Beta could not catch up.

Actually, this is a weak point. In Europe, we had another home
video format: Video 2000. It had a better picture quality than
VHS and Beta, LongPlay was always in the specification, there
were cassettes available which allowed 8 hours non-stop recording
(with LongPlay in a superior quiality than VHS), and you could turn
over the cassette to record the same amount of material again (just
like audio cassettes).

Video 2000 had hifi stereo sound much earlier than VHS. It had a clever
tracking system to reduce still flickering. The machines were as cheap
(or expensive, compared to today's prices ;-)) as their VHS
counterparts.

The only disadvantage of V2000 was that the video offices (sp? Those
strange places where you can rent tapes) had more material on VHS than
on V2000. Many people bought VHS and then never visited a video
office - it is sometimes good enough to score at a point the customer
doesn't even need!

Everybody who has a still working V2000 machine is keen to keep it.
Only lately the advent of very cheap S-VHS recorders which are able
to record on standard VHS cassettes has made the V2000 system largely
redundant.

It all boils down to one simple fact: technical merits do not help.

And, to come back to Ada, this is also relevant in the language
context. It helps to be technically better, but you need a certain
amount of marketing and "drive".

So long, Steffen

--
Steffen Huber         LambdaComm System - Welcome to Trollinger Country


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Re: Ada and QNX

[Ted Dennison]

In article <8shvjd$sa6$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  mjsilva@my-deja.com wrote:
> In article <39EA6305.CD5CFE1F@ix.netcom.com>,
>   Lao Xiao Hai <laoxhai@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
> > As people  seek to abandon Ada in favor of the glitzy languages so
> > popular in Dr. Dobbs discover how dreadful those languages are, they
> > reconsider the benefits of Ada.
>
> Is anyone aware of instances of "buyer's remorse" after switching from
> Ada to Brand X?

I'm aware of quite a few instances of "developer's remorse", but as that
wasn't from anyone who made the decision, I don't think its what you are
looking for.

--
T.E.D.

http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html


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Re: Ada and QNX

[mjsilva]

In article <8si17d$tul$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com> wrote:
> In article <8shvjd$sa6$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   mjsilva@my-deja.com wrote:
> > In article <39EA6305.CD5CFE1F@ix.netcom.com>,
> >   Lao Xiao Hai <laoxhai@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> >
> > > As people  seek to abandon Ada in favor of the glitzy languages so
> > > popular in Dr. Dobbs discover how dreadful those languages are,
they
> > > reconsider the benefits of Ada.
> >
> > Is anyone aware of instances of "buyer's remorse" after switching
from
> > Ada to Brand X?
>
> I'm aware of quite a few instances of "developer's remorse", but as
that
> wasn't from anyone who made the decision, I don't think its what you
are
> looking for.

I would be interested in hearing about "developer's remorse" as well.
What I'm looking for is any info regarding projects that probably
should be using Ada but have chosen Brand X instead, and whether or not
Brand X is proving to be a better, equal or worse choice.

BTW, Brand X could be any language, but I suspect it would usually be C
or C++.

Mike


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Buyer's Remorse? (was Re: Ada and QNX)

[mjsilva]

In article <8si17d$tul$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com> wrote:
> In article <8shvjd$sa6$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   mjsilva@my-deja.com wrote:
> > In article <39EA6305.CD5CFE1F@ix.netcom.com>,
> >   Lao Xiao Hai <laoxhai@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> >
> > > As people  seek to abandon Ada in favor of the glitzy languages so
> > > popular in Dr. Dobbs discover how dreadful those languages are,
they
> > > reconsider the benefits of Ada.
> >
> > Is anyone aware of instances of "buyer's remorse" after switching
from
> > Ada to Brand X?
>
> I'm aware of quite a few instances of "developer's remorse", but as
that
> wasn't from anyone who made the decision, I don't think its what you
are
> looking for.

(This is the same reply I posted a few minutes ago, but with a more
informative header)

I would be interested in hearing about "developer's remorse" as well.
What I'm looking for is any info regarding projects that probably
should be using Ada but have chosen Brand X instead, and whether or not
Brand X is proving to be a better, equal or worse choice.

BTW, Brand X could be any language, but I suspect it would usually be C
or C++.

Mike




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Re: Ada and QNX

[aek]

Igor Kovalenko <kovalenko@home.com> wrote:
>wolves trained to kill treacherous western invaders. It came to me
there
>clear as holy shining that Ada must be one of them, being made by DoD.
>Also, 'Ada' sounds a lot like 'hell' in russian.

That reminds me an old arictle in a leading Soviet newspaper where the
author
described new programming language Ada, which was sponsored by
Pentagon, as
"the language of thermonuclear hell". Surely, that author tried to
point out
on the same imagined proximity.
  But in fact, Ada isn't sound like the Russian word for "hell". The
latter
has 2 letters, not 3, and it isn't even "ad" - that "ad" would be
straightforward
transliteration, but the Russian word for the hell is pronounced as
"ud" would
be pronounced in English.
  Moreover, "Ada" is fully legitimate woman's name in Russia, anf not
too rare.
And although in Russian that name is pronounced much more closely to
the "ud",
nobody in Russia associates it with the hell.

Just to prevent misiformation,


Alexander Kopilovitch                      aek@vib.usr.pu.ru
Saint-Petersburg
Russia


\x1a


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Re: Ada and QNX

[Gautier]

>   Moreover, "Ada" is fully legitimate woman's name in Russia, and not
> too rare.
> And although in Russian that name is pronounced much more closely to
> the "ud",
> nobody in Russia associates it with the hell.

For non Russian-speaking people, I recommend to read in the famous
novel "Ada or ardor" by Vladimir Nabokov how to spell it correctly,
"a la russe".

_____________________________________________
Gautier  --  http://members.xoom.com/gdemont/

Re: Ada and QNX

[Gautier]

Igor Kovalenko:

> Ada must be as alive as Elvis, looking at this chorus of passionate
> fans. But at least Elvis was The King when he walked the streets ;)

He _is_ still the King - I'm sure I have seen him yesterday
in the street!

Gautier - an enthusiast, not a fan: if you know something really
better than Ada for my needs, write me ;-).

Re: Ada and QNX

[Frode Tennebø]

Robert Dewar wrote:
[snip]
> What arguments would impress management. Well try this on
> for size "Ada will help you achieve level 3 CMM more rapidly
> and realiably". I suspect this is definitely true, and I could
> (and have) written papers to support this, but I would be
> interested in other people's viewpoints. There's a tecnical
> advantage that definitely WOULD play in some circles.

My company is currently trying to "climb the CMM ladder" (sic). Could
you please give me som pointers to such articles?

 -Frode

-- 
^ Frode Tenneb� | email: frodet@nvg.org | Frode@IRC  ^
| with Standard.Disclaimer; use Standard.Disclaimer; |

Re: Ada and QNX

[Ted Dennison]

In article <39ECAD59.20C486B@motorola.com>,
  Igor Kovalenko <Igor.Kovalenko@motorola.com> wrote:
> What's up with you, lost your humor sense, or what? You should spend
> some quality time in Siberia, it is good for mind integrity.

Ahhh. I can just never get enough of that good old Soviet humor. :-)

--
T.E.D.

http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html


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Re: Ada and QNX

[Armin Steinhoff]

In article <39ECAE97.4BAA8BBE@maths.unine.ch>, Gautier says...
>
>Igor Kovalenko:
>
>> Ada must be as alive as Elvis, looking at this chorus of passionate
>> fans. But at least Elvis was The King when he walked the streets ;)
>
>He _is_ still the King - I'm sure I have seen him yesterday
>in the street!
>
>Gautier - an enthusiast,

As a real enthusiast ... I would port GNAT to QNX RTP :-)

> not a fan: if you know something really
>better than Ada for my needs, write me ;-).

OK ... let us know what your needs are.

Armin

Re: Ada and QNX

[Pat Rogers]

"Igor Kovalenko" <Igor.Kovalenko@motorola.com> wrote in message
news:39ECAD59.20C486B@motorola.com...
<snip>

> What's up with you, lost your humor sense, or what? You should spend
> some quality time in Siberia, it is good for mind integrity.

There are only so many trees one could count before losing one's
mind...  :-)

Re: Ada and QNX

[Igor Kovalenko]

Now I'm being taught russian, too :(
Just when I thought to scare away some of the devils...

FYI, 'Ada' pronounced in russian way sounds exactly like corresponding
part of 'gates of hell' said in russian, but that was not the point.
What's up with you, lost your humor sense, or what? You should spend
some quality time in Siberia, it is good for mind integrity.

- igor

aek@vib.usr.pu.ru wrote:
> 
> Igor Kovalenko <kovalenko@home.com> wrote:
> >wolves trained to kill treacherous western invaders. It came to me
> there
> >clear as holy shining that Ada must be one of them, being made by DoD.
> >Also, 'Ada' sounds a lot like 'hell' in russian.
> 
> That reminds me an old arictle in a leading Soviet newspaper where the
> author
> described new programming language Ada, which was sponsored by
> Pentagon, as
> "the language of thermonuclear hell". Surely, that author tried to
> point out
> on the same imagined proximity.
>   But in fact, Ada isn't sound like the Russian word for "hell". The
> latter
> has 2 letters, not 3, and it isn't even "ad" - that "ad" would be
> straightforward
> transliteration, but the Russian word for the hell is pronounced as
> "ud" would
> be pronounced in English.
>   Moreover, "Ada" is fully legitimate woman's name in Russia, anf not
> too rare.
> And although in Russian that name is pronounced much more closely to
> the "ud",
> nobody in Russia associates it with the hell.
> 
> Just to prevent misiformation,
> 
> Alexander Kopilovitch                      aek@vib.usr.pu.ru
> Saint-Petersburg
> Russia
> 
>

Re: Ada and QNX

[Igor Kovalenko]

I did not mean for him to 'count trees'. I lived and worked there (east
side of Baikal lake) and that had its bright moments. In reasonable
dozes yes, it might be good for mind integrity. I have to say though, in
Soviet Army that place was usually referred to as 'ZabVO' which should
mean 'behind-baikal-military-district' but we treated it as
'ZABud-Vernutsya-Obratno' which means 'forget to return back' ;)

Indeed, humor was good sometimes.
- igor

Pat Rogers wrote:
> 
> "Igor Kovalenko" <Igor.Kovalenko@motorola.com> wrote in message
> news:39ECAD59.20C486B@motorola.com...
> <snip>
> 
> > What's up with you, lost your humor sense, or what? You should spend
> > some quality time in Siberia, it is good for mind integrity.
> 
> There are only so many trees one could count before losing one's
> mind...  :-)

Re: Ada and QNX

[Robert Dewar]

In article <39EB662D.F2C8B55B@acm.org>,
  Marin David Condic <mcondic.nospam@acm.org> wrote:

> To use an analogy that's been used before: Which is better?
Sony's Beta format or
> VHS? From most technical standpoints, Beta was a better
format. Why didn't it catch
> on? A thousand reasons can be given, but few will be based on
some sort of
> "Technical Superiority" of VHS.

I know this is off topic, but in fact I think the above is
an example of myth, and exposes an interesting failure of
many technical folks, which is that they do not understand
what are and are not important technical characteristics.

Yes, Beta had better picture quality, but that was NOT the
important technical feature, the dominating technical feature
was the maximum recording time, and VHS got ahead there so
significantly that Beta could not catch up.

I actually think this error is made in HDTV today, for most
people resolution is not that important. Speaking as someone
with high end HDTV equipment, I will say that most people
don't really care about the difference between DVD (480p)
and HDTV (720p or 1050i). The wide screen is important, but
in my view the practice that is appearing of broadcasting
16 x 9 material in 1050i is a mistake, it would be better
to broadcast more channels at 480p.

Why is this relevant to comp.lang.ada? Well a lot of our
discussion and support of Ada is based on alledged technical
superiority, I say alledged because it is not so easy to prove
superiority in this field. What we need to be sure of is that
the factors that we stress are indeed those that are important
and real.

I recently saw someone say in an influential list on Ada that
they thought that the fact that Ada had a better defined
standard was a crucial element to Ada's success. My own feeling
is that even if this were true (it is not!) then it would not
be terribly important, and if we concentrated on that aspect
to the exclusion of others, we would definitely be making the
beta mistake, and even if we DID achieve a better defined
standard, it is not what would impress the real world.

What arguments would impress management. Well try this on
for size "Ada will help you achieve level 3 CMM more rapidly
and realiably". I suspect this is definitely true, and I could
(and have) written papers to support this, but I would be
interested in other people's viewpoints. There's a tecnical
advantage that definitely WOULD play in some circles.

Robert Dewar


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Re: Ada and QNX

[Robert Dewar]

In article <39EB42B1.A14BDCB6@motorola.com>,
  Igor Kovalenko <Igor.Kovalenko@motorola.com> wrote:

> Sure, I bought a book simply to have it collect some dust.
> That's very reasonable assumption given that such fat books
> are usually rather expensive.

One is tempted to suppose a smiley is meant here, but other
evidence in Igor's posts make it clear that he certainly has
NOT read an Ada book carefully, so who knows?

>
> > Since when does one need to know "the whole damn thing" to
> > use any
> > programming language or other complex tool?
> >
>
> Since the time it became obvious that if you don't want the
> whole Ada you might as well go with C/C++.

Things seem to become obvious to you in mysterious ways,
certainly objective information does not seem to be an
ingrediant in this process. The above statement is complete
nonsense.

Actually in my experience, Ada programs in general tend to
use far more of Ada than is true in the case of C++. I see
lots and lots of C++ programs that just completely ignore
very important parts of the language, including for example,
exceptions, name spaces, and the standard template library,
and indeed inheritance for many programs.

> I did not say anything is missing. I said that it is 'too
> high' which should mean there is just too much stuff to bear
> along with what you really need in most cases.

I am beginning to think this is all a big joke, I think that
it is likely that Igor is just having fun in trolling. Since
it is hard to believe that anyone could be this blatant in
forming bogus conclusions with no data (note that Igor has
not even given a TRACE of evidence that he knows anything
about Ada other than how to properly case the name of the
language).

> Note that strictly speaking I never said Ada is wrong thing in
> general,

Given that you don't know Ada, that's probably wise, one of the
few wise decisions represented here.


> I just stated that it is not good for my personal taste.

Of course you have no way of knowing this, but I find many
people find that it is convenient to dismiss languages
without knowing them (and before the Ada folks join in
righteous agreement, hands up all those who are sure
COBOL is junk but don't know it!)

> My original intention was not to denounce Ada, but to say that
> pissing on C++ does not do any good for Ada.

I am reminded of Lieberman saying in a recent speach that he
would not criticize Bush, but would criticize his record. It
is definitely a bad idea to just generally denounce C++
without knowing it, and those who do, don't help and just
make themselves look silly (as Igor does when he generally
denounces Ada -- although if this is a clever troll, then
hats off, because it is very well done :-)

On the other hand if you DO know C++ well, it is quite in
bounds to specifically point out what is wrong with it. If
you really *do* know both languages, this is not hard to do!

> I see, nobody seems to want to continue the
> wedding analogy, but many are happy to let off some steam on
> me no matter how many disclaimers I put. I guess it was
> mistake to give you guys such an easy target :)

Not if you were deliberately trolling :-)


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Re: Ada and QNX

[Igor Kovalenko]

Robert Dewar wrote:
> 
> One is tempted to suppose a smiley is meant here, but other
> evidence in Igor's posts make it clear that he certainly has
> NOT read an Ada book carefully, so who knows?
> 

I did read it and not once. And yes, it was useful reading and I had
enjoyed some parts of it. And no, I did not use Ada in a serious
project. To give you some more background, I knew Pascal before C, PL/1
and Fortran before Pascal and IBM360 assembler before that. I also did
straight machine-code programming occasionally including some esoteric
architectures with 45 bit word, which I believe still control some
russian satellites.

> Things seem to become obvious to you in mysterious ways,
> certainly objective information does not seem to be an
> ingrediant in this process.

The main ingredient is a magic crystal ball which I carefully hide in my
dungeon. I found one back in Siberia's forests while walking my pet
wolves trained to kill treacherous western invaders. It came to me there
clear as holy shining that Ada must be one of them, being made by DoD.
Also, 'Ada' sounds a lot like 'hell' in russian.

> The above statement is complete
> nonsense.

You don't ever say 'IMHO'. You must have another crystal ball, bigger
than mine :(

> Actually in my experience, Ada programs in general tend to
> use far more of Ada than is true in the case of C++. I see
> lots and lots of C++ programs that just completely ignore
> very important parts of the language, including for example,
> exceptions, name spaces, and the standard template library,
> and indeed inheritance for many programs.
> 

One could blame you for being unjust here. There are bad programs in C++
and there are bad programs in Ada. Nothing in Ada prevents one from
writing those, just as nothing in Ada makes all Ada programs bad. Same
story for C++. You however dare to say that more C++ programs are bad
than Ada programs. Perhaps, but then it is mostly because there are
simply far more C++ programs in total than Ada programs.

> I am beginning to think this is all a big joke, I think that
> it is likely that Igor is just having fun in trolling.

Well, I have been told in the middle of this thread that trolling about
C++ does indeed make a lot of fun for Ada supporters. So, may be I'm
trolling too, and may be not, but if I'm not I may start without notice
because I used to be a good troller and have to support my reputation
once in a while.

> Since
> it is hard to believe that anyone could be this blatant in
> forming bogus conclusions with no data (note that Igor has
> not even given a TRACE of evidence that he knows anything
> about Ada other than how to properly case the name of the
> language).

Yes I know her name. Not sure if she'd liked what DoD have done with it.

> I am reminded of Lieberman saying in a recent speach that he
> would not criticize Bush, but would criticize his record. It

For that matter this whole thread reminds me those arguments of
respective candidates. Everyone knows that no matter what the hell they
say people will choose based of their human sympathies, yet everyone
exercises in denouncing each other. But those folks at least have a
clear goal and timetable and they know one of them will sure as hell
win, unlike us here ;)

> is definitely a bad idea to just generally denounce C++
> without knowing it, and those who do, don't help and just
> make themselves look silly (as Igor does when he generally
> denounces Ada -- although if this is a clever troll, then
> hats off, because it is very well done :-)
> 

Ouch, I have earned a compliment for trolling, perhaps I should stick to
it as it seems to be what I'm best at =:>

> Not if you were deliberately trolling :-)
> 

I was not, originally. If you take time to read my first post it was in
responce to rather reckless and unsupported rant about C++, made in
quite insulting manner for true C++ adepts, but NOT cross-posted to
comp.lang.c++. Yet I still was pretty careful to say only few words
about my personal _perception_ of Ada and I have put a big disclaimer
there. I had no idea what a can of worms that will open. 

Ada must be as alive as Elvis, looking at this chorus of passionate
fans. But at least Elvis was The King when he walked the streets ;)

- Igor

Re: Ada and QNX

[Igor Kovalenko]

Robert Dewar wrote:
> perhaps because mere technical superiority is not enough.
> Remember that the really successful programming languages
> in terms of usage (COBOL, Visual Basic, and I guess even
> Excel Macro language should count) do not succeed solely
> because of technical excellence, but because of historical
> factors.
> 
> After all Fortran succeeded over Algol-60, and for SURE
> that was not a matter of superiority of language. I also
> note that Windows-9X succeeded over OS/2, which is even
> more surprising.
> 
> Technical folks always suppose that technical excellence
> is enough to succeed in the market place. I would have
> thought that the dominance of Microsoft in the operating
> system arena (even in the MS DOS days!) would have perhaps
> reminded people that this is not the case, but ....

Did you intentionally overlooked the fact that some new languages found
their way into mainstream and some did not? They all faced similar
uphill battle against historical issues and human prejudice.
Nevertheless, Java did hit the streets. And C++ did, roughly at the same
time as Ada failed. Sure C++ had advantage of being similar to C, but
then Ada is similar enough to Pascal. Perl emerged as major scripting
language although I doubt there was anything like dedicated marketing
support and there were and still are many competitors. How would you
explain all that?

Also, comparing programming languages to OSes is really stretched
analogy, to put it mildly. A new OS faces much more challenge to make
its way, due to hardware support and applications availability issues.
No such problems with PL - if one have to write new code anyway, it does
not matter which language to choose from compatibility point of view.

> > Perhaps my personal doubts aren't that personal, huh?
> 
> and perhaps they most certainly are, a lot of decisions are
> made on the basis of uninformed personal prejudice of the
> kind you exhibited.

I suppose you always do exhibit absolute lack of personal prejudice, so
that gives you right to blame me for it.

> Actually Ada would be an excellent technical choice for writing
> an operating system, the reason that the current operating
> systems are written in some other language is mostly historical.

Historically OS were written in assembler. Then people started to use C
and they don't seem to be inclined to change that. You can call it
historical, I will call it practical.

> > And by the way, many people say that GCC does not generate
> > good code for C
> 
> Well many people say all sorts of unsupported things (you
> demonstrate this principle in your post)

You could not fail to mention that, could you? Which exactly unsupported
thing did _I_ say AND claimed it to be anything but matter of my
personal taste? I do not share the view of those who denounces GCC. I
said 'some people say' merely to point to simple fact that there are
such people. Based on that I asked how people can so easily claim GNAT
to be efficient given that the language places a lot more burden onto
compiler. I did not say it is impossible for GNAT to be good but I said
that it probably trades efficiency of code for portability (by which I
mean ability of compiler to generate code for different
architectures/OSes).

Note, I'm not blaming either GCC or GNAT for such a tradeoff - in fact I
supported such tradeoff in an another discussion.

> It would be easy to satisfy your curiosity, the compiler and
> sources are out there.

That kind of answer usually means you hardly can explain that yourself.

> You suspect wrong, in fact RV is programmed using standard
> POSIX primitives that are typically available on all commonly
> used systems.

That is rather vague statement. Even if 'standard' (whatever that means)
POSIX primitives were available on all systems (which is not true), then
POSIX is about portability, not efficiency. 

> Now of course RV is a fairly high level
> abstraction, which you use if you want to abstract at this
> level. If you want lower level things, then you use them
> in Ada (indeed there is nothing to stop you using any
> low level system dependent gizmo that you would use in
> C if you like).
> 

If you throw away fairly high level stuff of Ada then it might not be so
much better than C++. Why bother learning it and convincing management
to use it?

> In general you seem a bit too willing to substitute your
> ill-informed guesses for facts.
> 

That's 3rd time in single post you're pointing out to my misbehavior.
Just can't miss a chance, can you? If this thread is gonna be about me
personally, we might want to move it to alt.sex.selebrities because I'm
gonna be a star if you keep it that way 8-}

- igor

Re: Ada and QNX

[Ted Dennison]

In article <39ECE5C1.918BCF3B@motorola.com>,
  Igor Kovalenko <Igor.Kovalenko@motorola.com> wrote:
> I did not mean for him to 'count trees'. I lived and worked there
> (east side of Baikal lake) and that had its bright moments. In
> reasonable dozes yes, it might be good for mind integrity. I have to

Ahhh. I take back my joke then. Lake Baikal is supposed to be beautiful.
It used to be the cleanest freshwater lake in the world. I think it
holds something like 1/5th of all the freshwater in the world.

You have to realize that in the US (and possibly western Europe too, I
don't know) "Sibera" is known primarily as the place dissedents got sent
to work in Soviet prison camps. Even for those of us who realize it is a
very large and diverse area, the first image that comes to mind is
prisoners working with pick-axes in a snowstorm.

I'm sure'll get better eventually.

--
T.E.D.

http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html


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Re: Ada and QNX

[Pat Rogers]

"Igor Kovalenko" <Igor.Kovalenko@motorola.com> wrote in message
news:39ECE5C1.918BCF3B@motorola.com...

<snip>

> Indeed, humor was good sometimes.

I miss the jokes about the Soviet rulers; it seems the new leaders
don't evoke the same need to laugh (to keep from crying, no doubt).
(Although there are a few jokes about Yeltsin's drinking.)  You know,
for example the one about Gorbachev, Brezhnev, Khrushchev, and Stalin
riding on a train together, and it breaks down.  First they go to
Stalin, who order the engineers shot.  The train starts again
(mysteriously) but eventually breaks down again.  They go to
Khrushchev, who orders the previously-shot engineers to be
rehabilitated and returned to work.  The trains starts again, and
eventually stops again.  Brezhnev says (indistinctly) "What train?".
Same thing occurs, and Gorbachev says "Everybody out and push!".

What's an amateur Sovietologist (as opposed to Kremliniologist; I had
no favorites) to do when the Soviets go away?

---
Patrick Rogers                      Consulting and Training in:
http://www.classwide.com      Deadline Schedulability Analysis
progers@classwide.com        Software Fault Tolerance
(281)648-3165                       Real-Time/OO Languages

Adam ... does not deserve all the credit; much is due to Eve, the
first woman, and Satan, the first consultant.
Mark Twain

Re: Ada and QNX

[Pat Rogers]

"Ted Dennison" <dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message
news:8skcoc$s0i$1@nnrp1.deja.com...
> In article <39ECE5C1.918BCF3B@motorola.com>,
>   Igor Kovalenko <Igor.Kovalenko@motorola.com> wrote:
> > I did not mean for him to 'count trees'. I lived and worked there
> > (east side of Baikal lake) and that had its bright moments. In
> > reasonable dozes yes, it might be good for mind integrity. I have
to
>
> Ahhh. I take back my joke then. Lake Baikal is supposed to be
beautiful.
> It used to be the cleanest freshwater lake in the world. I think it
> holds something like 1/5th of all the freshwater in the world.
>
> You have to realize that in the US (and possibly western Europe too,
I
> don't know) "Sibera" is known primarily as the place dissedents got
sent
> to work in Soviet prison camps. Even for those of us who realize it
is a
> very large and diverse area, the first image that comes to mind is
> prisoners working with pick-axes in a snowstorm.

Before the soviets, the Czars would exile people there, but not to
hard labor.  They had nothing to do, thus the 'counting trees' saying.

---
Patrick Rogers                      Consulting and Training in:
http://www.classwide.com      Deadline Schedulability Analysis
progers@classwide.com        Software Fault Tolerance
(281)648-3165                       Real-Time/OO Languages

Adam ... does not deserve all the credit; much is due to Eve, the
first woman, and Satan, the first consultant.
Mark Twain

Re: Ada and QNX

[Pat Rogers]

"Igor Kovalenko" <Igor.Kovalenko@motorola.com> wrote in message
news:39EDBB20.1C2349FD@motorola.com...
> Pat Rogers wrote:
> >
> > "Igor Kovalenko" <Igor.Kovalenko@motorola.com> wrote in message
> > news:39ECE5C1.918BCF3B@motorola.com...
> >
> > <snip>
> >
> > > Indeed, humor was good sometimes.
> >
> > I miss the jokes about the Soviet rulers; it seems the new leaders
> > don't evoke the same need to laugh (to keep from crying, no
doubt).
> > (Although there are a few jokes about Yeltsin's drinking.)  You
know,
> > for example the one about Gorbachev, Brezhnev, Khrushchev, and
Stalin
> > riding on a train together, and it breaks down.  First they go to
> > Stalin, who order the engineers shot.  The train starts again
> > (mysteriously) but eventually breaks down again.  They go to
> > Khrushchev, who orders the previously-shot engineers to be
> > rehabilitated and returned to work.  The trains starts again, and
> > eventually stops again.  Brezhnev says (indistinctly) "What
train?".
> > Same thing occurs, and Gorbachev says "Everybody out and push!".
> >
>
> Two inhabitants of remote north-east Siberia (called chukchas, they
are
> close relatives of eskimoses) sit down on a shore fishing. One
starts to
> tell a joke about soviet rulers, the other listens and after a while
> says: 'you should be careful telling this kind of jokes. one might
go to
> an exile for them'.

:-)  :-)

> > What's an amateur Sovietologist (as opposed to Kremliniologist; I
had
> > no favorites) to do when the Soviets go away?
>
> I noticed Hollywood switched to chineese. Try jokes about their
leaders
> then ;)

For some, that situation is more cause for crying than laughing.

And now I think we've taken this thread sufficiently far astray...

Re: Ada and QNX

[Robert Dewar]

In article <1FwFbWdX$ENE@eisner.decus.org>,
  Kilgallen@eisner.decus.org.nospam (Larry Kilgallen) wrote:
> In article <8sg6g2$eur$1@nnrp1.deja.com>, Robert Dewar
<robert_dewar@my-deja.com> writes:
>
>
> Obviously you and I differ regarding how well they do at
> filling the existing channels and how more channels might
> affect that but continuing that line would be quite off topic.

True, but since you continued it, I will too :-) Right now
I get 1.25 HDTV 1050i channels, I would definitely prefer
more 480p channels, it will be a while before HDTV is subject
to channel bloat :-)
>
> > Why is this relevant to comp.lang.ada? Well a lot of our
> > discussion and support of Ada is based on alledged technical
> > superiority, I say alledged because it is not so easy to
prove
> > superiority in this field. What we need to be sure of is
that
> > the factors that we stress are indeed those that are
important
> > and real.
>
> A good point, rarely considered here.  It needs a buzz-word

Suggestions welcome!

>
> > I recently saw someone say in an influential list on Ada
that
> > they thought that the fact that Ada had a better defined
> > standard was a crucial element to Ada's success. My own
feeling
> > is that even if this were true (it is not!) then it would
not
> > be terribly important, and if we concentrated on that aspect
> > to the exclusion of others, we would definitely be making
the
> > beta mistake, and even if we DID achieve a better defined
> > standard, it is not what would impress the real world.
>
> I would say that Ada has a more widely accepted standard than
> many of the alternatives.  The absolute number of Pascal
compilers
> that attempt to implement the full Extended Pascal standard
seems
> to be about 2.  Certainly the percentage is frightening. I
tried
> some conversion software to regularly transform Pascal code
from
> one dialect to another, and it was a burdensome experience.
>
> > What arguments would impress management. Well try this on
> > for size "Ada will help you achieve level 3 CMM more rapidly
> > and realiably". I suspect this is definitely true, and I
could
> > (and have) written papers to support this, but I would be
> > interested in other people's viewpoints. There's a tecnical
> > advantage that definitely WOULD play in some circles.
>
> But in other circles the only possible technical advantage
that
> could play is "time to market".  I believe for the slight
change
> of "time to market with a defect rate less than X" could be
won
> by Ada for suitably small X.  Not all circles will care, but
some
> will care who do not care about CMM

Absolutely! I was not suggesting that this be the ONLY or even
MAIN reason for pushing Ada, just one more interesting one that
will be relevant for certainly circles




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Re: Ada and QNX

[Robert Dewar]

In article <8shnk8$kov$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com> wrote:
> That is indeed a good example of a technical argument for VHS.
However,
> I think a far more convincing argument in VHS's favor was that
it was an
> open format, whereas Beta was closly held by one company. When
in
> direct competition with an open platform, proprietary formats
> typically don't stand a chance.


Well you know the general argument definitely appeals to me
with my ACT hat on :-)

But in fact I think that's rewriting history, I don't see
that as the big factor in the failure of Beta.


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Re: Ada and QNX

[Tarjei T. Jensen]

Igor Kovalenko wrote
>Did you intentionally overlooked the fact that some new languages found
>their way into mainstream and some did not? They all faced similar
>uphill battle against historical issues and human prejudice.
>Nevertheless, Java did hit the streets. And C++ did, roughly at the same
>time as Ada failed. Sure C++ had advantage of being similar to C, but
>then Ada is similar enough to Pascal. Perl emerged as major scripting
>language although I doubt there was anything like dedicated marketing
>support and there were and still are many competitors. How would you
>explain all that?

C++ found its way to the mainstream for two reasons 1) G++ was free. 2) a
better C. 1) meant that a lot of people could teach  OOP without paying for
compilers. Students did not notice the cost aspect of this and thought that C++
was the best available OO language.

Java found its way to the mainstream for two reasons 1) the compiler was free.
2) a better C++. Se above paragraph for how this works for 1). Reason 2) means
that people have a hard time getting C++ code to work. Some claim that it takes
longer time to get C++ code to work than the equivalent C code.


>Historically OS were written in assembler. Then people started to use C
>and they don't seem to be inclined to change that. You can call it
>historical, I will call it practical.


Assembly language operating systems are the exception and have been that for
quite a long time. The last 20 years people have probably done most of the
operating system work in C, but also Ada, C++, Modula-2 and various Pascal
dialects.


>If you throw away fairly high level stuff of Ada then it might not be so
>much better than C++. Why bother learning it and convincing management
>to use it?


Because it saves time. Lots of time. See the "Interesting Ada article" thread
in comp.lang.ada.

Greetings,

Re: Ada and QNX

[Marin David Condic]

Igor Kovalenko wrote:

> Indeed, humor was good sometimes.

Humor or not, my impression of Siberia is that it is a place that is cold. I
grew up in Michigan and that's a place that gets reasonably cold - and lots
of snow! My address has been in Florida for a number of years now and I
intend to keep it that way.

Now to segue back to Ada..... :-)

While Ada definitely has its roots in the US DoD and is still used a lot
within the defense industry, I don't think its fair to characterize it as
"the language of thermonuclear hell" (see back up a few layers in this
thread). At least not anymore. It is used in many non-DoD related
applications. When I was with Pratt & Whitney, we had so much success with
building out military engine controls in Ada that our whole process
eventually got adopted by our bretheren in the commercial engine business up
in Connecticut. (It also gets cold up there, which is why I no longer work
at Pratt! :-) We were able to demonstrate with metrics that we had improved
our productivity to over double what it was and that we reduced our defects
by a factor of four. And this was hard-realtime, mission critical software,
so we had lots of the same design constraints people would have doing
operating system work. It gets hard to argue with that kind of success, so
the commercial side eventually adopted what we were doing on the military
side.

MDC
--
======================================================================
Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ q u a d r u s c o r p . c o m
Visit my web site at:  http://www.mcondic.com/

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======================================================================

Re: Ada and QNX

[Igor Kovalenko]

Pat Rogers wrote:
> 
> "Igor Kovalenko" <Igor.Kovalenko@motorola.com> wrote in message
> news:39ECE5C1.918BCF3B@motorola.com...
> 
> <snip>
> 
> > Indeed, humor was good sometimes.
> 
> I miss the jokes about the Soviet rulers; it seems the new leaders
> don't evoke the same need to laugh (to keep from crying, no doubt).
> (Although there are a few jokes about Yeltsin's drinking.)  You know,
> for example the one about Gorbachev, Brezhnev, Khrushchev, and Stalin
> riding on a train together, and it breaks down.  First they go to
> Stalin, who order the engineers shot.  The train starts again
> (mysteriously) but eventually breaks down again.  They go to
> Khrushchev, who orders the previously-shot engineers to be
> rehabilitated and returned to work.  The trains starts again, and
> eventually stops again.  Brezhnev says (indistinctly) "What train?".
> Same thing occurs, and Gorbachev says "Everybody out and push!".
> 

Two inhabitants of remote north-east Siberia (called chukchas, they are
close relatives of eskimoses) sit down on a shore fishing. One starts to
tell a joke about soviet rulers, the other listens and after a while
says: 'you should be careful telling this kind of jokes. one might go to
an exile for them'.

> What's an amateur Sovietologist (as opposed to Kremliniologist; I had
> no favorites) to do when the Soviets go away?

I noticed Hollywood switched to chineese. Try jokes about their leaders
then ;)

- igor

Re: Ada and QNX

[Igor Kovalenko]

Ted Dennison wrote:
> 
> In article <39ECE5C1.918BCF3B@motorola.com>,
>   Igor Kovalenko <Igor.Kovalenko@motorola.com> wrote:
> > I did not mean for him to 'count trees'. I lived and worked there
> > (east side of Baikal lake) and that had its bright moments. In
> > reasonable dozes yes, it might be good for mind integrity. I have to
> 
> Ahhh. I take back my joke then. Lake Baikal is supposed to be beautiful.
> It used to be the cleanest freshwater lake in the world. I think it
> holds something like 1/5th of all the freshwater in the world.
> 

Because it is bloody deep for a lake. Around 1000 meters (3000 feet). It
is cold because of that, too.

> You have to realize that in the US (and possibly western Europe too, I
> don't know) "Sibera" is known primarily as the place dissedents got sent
> to work in Soviet prison camps. Even for those of us who realize it is a
> very large and diverse area, the first image that comes to mind is
> prisoners working with pick-axes in a snowstorm.
> 
> I'm sure'll get better eventually.

Siberia is everything east to Ural mounains. Southern parts of it are
warm enough for wild grape to grow in the forests (it has nice but weird
taste reminding some subtropical fruit). Generally, it can get quite hot
in the summer, above (30C, 90F) and damned cold in the winter (-40C,
-50F). One part of it can get as cold as -70C (-110F), and that is not
good for mind integrity anymore ;)

- Igor

Re: Ada and QNX

[Igor Kovalenko]

Pat Rogers wrote:
> 
> Before the soviets, the Czars would exile people there, but not to
> hard labor.  They had nothing to do, thus the 'counting trees' saying.
> 

Yes, but they still sent people to hard labor too, which was not exile
but 'katorga'. Criminals went to katorga, politicals went to exile,
unless they were criminals too. Which was of course not fair to
criminals, so bolsheviks started to send everyone to katorga without
discrimination, even though Lenin himself got just exile for himself ;)

- igor

ADA vs. SmallEiffel

[Armin Steinhoff]

Hi All,

SmallEiffel (http://smalleiffel.loria.fr )compiles out of the box 
after setting the env. var 'SmallEiffel' ... has someone done a port
of GNAT for QNX RTP ?? 

Would be nice if we could do some benchmarks ...

.Armin

Re: Ada and QNX

[mark_lundquist]

In article <8sfm52$f4$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  mjsilva@my-deja.com wrote:
> In article <39EB42B1.A14BDCB6@motorola.com>,
>   Igor Kovalenko <Igor.Kovalenko@motorola.com> wrote:
> > mjsilva@my-deja.com wrote:
> > >
> > > In article <39EA9161.6469DDE2@home.com>,
> > >   Igor Kovalenko <kovalenko@home.com> wrote:
> > > > Ada is way too high and abstract to be good for system level
> > > programming
> > >
> > > What low-level system-programming functionality is missing in Ada?
> In
> > > fact Ada has more low-level functionality than C or C++.  It was,
> after
> > > all, originally designed for -embedded- applications.
> > >
> >
> > I did not say anything is missing. I said that it is 'too high'
which
> > should mean there is just too much stuff to bear along with what you
> > really need in most cases.
>
> OK, what 'too high' stuff must you bear in order to do system-level
> programming in Ada?

I've written device drivers, bootloader and debug monitor code, and a
full TCP/IP stack in Ada, and I have to say I really like Ada for
system-level programming.  Even in a "system level" project you are
going to have some bits that are really down on the bare iron, and then
the rest which is really your logic or whatever and is not
particularly "system-level", except by virtue of being part of
something bigger (like an OS) that you do consider to be "system-
level"!  And for all the rest of those bits, being able to program at
an appropriate level of abstraction is quite nice.  For the "bare iron"
bits, on the other hand, I really find nothing in Ada that gets in the
way or is "too abstract".  It's just not there.  This is from my
experience of actually using it.  The language will, however, tend to
get in your way if you insist on a C-style way of doing things, so you
have to learn how to do it the Ada way.  It's also true that the Ada
locutions are less cryptic and more verbose, which until you get the
feel of it may make it feel "too abstract" -- but really it's not.

I haven't really done any system-level programming in C or C++, but to
be fair I think a fair bit of any programming project in C (and even
C++) becomes indistinguishable from system-level progamming.  An
example would be whenever you have to deal with char [] strings (and
you do have to deal with them, even in C++, because while you might
prefer to use String objects instead, at some point you usually have to
interface w/ pieces of code that did *not* use String!)  Another
example is when application code has to call an OS for which C is the
natural binding.  In Ada the virtually-system-level bits are still
there where you have to deal with the OS, but if you're using a thick
binding (like POSIX) then the low-level bits are hidden for you in the
binding.

Mark Lundquist
Rational Software


Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.

CMM in outside software (was Re: Ada and QNX)

[Robert I. Eachus]

(This grew from an endorsement of Robert Dewar's idea into a rant on the
shortsightedness of American corporate management, in the guise of a
discussion of designing CPU chips.)

Robert Dewar wrote:
> 
> What arguments would impress management. Well try this on
> for size "Ada will help you achieve level 3 CMM more rapidly
> and realiably". I suspect this is definitely true, and I could
> (and have) written papers to support this, but I would be
> interested in other people's viewpoints. There's a tecnical
> advantage that definitely WOULD play in some circles.

I'm not sure, and I am not sure that there are many managements that
understand what a level 3 CMM will do for them other than check off some
government contracting box.

But take a look at Intel and AMD right now.  Intel has put a lot of
effort into getting a chip design and manufacturing capability that is
repeatable.  By doing so they have become one of the largest companies
in the world.  And take my word for it, Intel is better at designing
chips--not architectures--than almost anyone else in the world.

Up until a year ago, Intel used AMD as a footstool, and kicked them from
time to time when Intel thought AMD was getting uppity.  Then came the
Athlon.  The Athlon didn't come out of nowhere.  The design team that
developed it previously developed the K6 and K6/2 processors.  A few
months before the Athlon was announced, an Intel executive talked about
how in 4Q2000, Intel would be introducing the Willamette at 1.1 GHz, and
the fastest Athlon would be running at 666 MHz.  AMD introduced the
Athlon at four speeds, 500, 550, 600, and 650 MHz.  Ooops!  Intel's
fastest processor at the time was running at 600 MHz.  Wouldn't have
mattered, except that the Athlon was faster per clock at floating-point,
and had a much faster memory bus, had much bigger L1 caches, etc.  Even
at the same clock speed it was a much better chip, all around.  AMD then
took this new architecture, and introduced the K75 which was the first 1
GHz chip, the Thunderbird, with on-chip L2 cache, and a little brother
the Spitfire (Duron), that walked all over the Celeron.  (Right now, AMD
is not competing with the Celerons--they have repositioned the Duron
against the Pentium III.)

AMD this week announced a second 1.2 Ghz chip with a 266 MHz Front side
bus, a chipset to allow DDR (double data rate) SDRAM to be used with the
Athlon and Duron, and missed their first scheduled product introduction
this year.  They decided to wait a week or so and announce the newest
Athlon core, the Mustang, at Comdex.  (The chip was initially scheduled
for an October release.)

What has all this got to do with the SEI CMM?  Well, after twenty years
in the wilderness, AMD finally realized that what they needed was not a
better product than Intel, they needed a better process for developing
new products.  The "Classic" Athlon (at 0.25 micron) was released about
the same time as Intel's new Coppermine (0.18 core) for the Pentium
III.  Then came the K75 (Pluto) core (at 0.18 micron), the Thunderbird
(again 0.18 but some with copper interconnects), and Mustang (again 0.18
copper) is the first of the next generation of AMD chips to be
announced, and will be announced next week.  A week or to later Intel
will announce their new Pentium chip, the Willamette.

So AMD will have gone through three new architecture releases in the
time it takes Intel to do one.  But that is not exactly true.  Intel has
more than one product design team, and expects a major new design like
the Willamette to take up to four years.  Unfortunately, Willamette took
longer than that.  (And Merced/Itanium has taken so long that it is
obsolete before it is released. Intel is hoping that McKinley will
change that at some point next year.)

Ah, you say, the K75 and Thunderbird were just minor tweaks.  In one
sense true, in another irrelevant. The difference between Katmai and
Coppermine is about the same as the difference between the K75 and the
T-bird.  The Mustang is probably a bit more of a change from the T-bird,
but the next core after the Mustang is the Sledgehammer, and it is at
least as innovative as the original Pentium Pro.  Of course, the
Sledgehammer is not on schedule for a late 2001 release--it is a little
early since it taped out this week.  Between Mustang and Sledgehammer,
there will be the Palomino desktop chip, and a mobile variant, and the
Morgan (new Duron) and its mobile version. That's right, AMD is in the
midst of announcing more major new products in the October to February
time period than ever before in their history, so they cleaned up the
next major project early and got it out of the way.  (AMD may or may not
also release the Clawhammer somewhere in there. Clawhammer is a
prototype x86-64 chip that may be in house only. But I heard rumors they
might merge the ISA enhansements from the Clawhammer into the Palomino. 
How's that for reuse.)
 
Intel is hoping to catch up to AMD next year.  But they haven't gotten
the message yet.  Right now there is a lot of talk about whether the
Willamette will be able to match the Athlon when it is released, or if
they will have to wait for the 1.7 GHz or 2.0 GHz versions.  But AMD
will have a new (and from what I have heard) much faster chip next
week.  The Willamette may not even hold the clock speed record when
shipped.  Jerry Saunders' (AMD's CEO) last word on the subject was new
higher speeds every few weeks, 1.5 GHz by January.  Right now Willamette
is expected to be announced at 1.4 and 1.5 GHz on Nov. 20th.  The
Mustang is expected to be announced at 1.4 GHz and several other speeds
next week.  The speculation is on the "several other speeds. ;-)

How many billions of dollars has working on their development process
been worth to AMD?  (My guess is about 1 billion cash, and 10 billion in
market cap so far.)  And how much has lack of a better process cost
Intel.  (Not that much so far, maybe 100 billion of market cap or so,
but wait 'til next year.)  Who else has been focusing on process
recently?  Well, Jack Welsh has been doing it for years at GE.  Six
Sigma is almost a corporate religion now.  And it really is the case,
when some process doesn't work right, they don't brush it off, they look
at what can be done to fix the process--if it really is broken.

Given all that, wouldn't you think that more company executives would
focus their energies on improving internal processes?

Re: CMM in outside software (was Re: Ada and QNX)

[Ken Garlington]

"Robert I. Eachus" <rieachus@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:3A024909.4DEC49AA@earthlink.net...
: (This grew from an endorsement of Robert Dewar's idea into a rant on the
: shortsightedness of American corporate management, in the guise of a
: discussion of designing CPU chips.)
:
: Robert Dewar wrote:
: >
: > What arguments would impress management. Well try this on
: > for size "Ada will help you achieve level 3 CMM more rapidly
: > and realiably". I suspect this is definitely true, and I could
: > (and have) written papers to support this, but I would be
: > interested in other people's viewpoints. There's a tecnical
: > advantage that definitely WOULD play in some circles.

Our company process (which was rated at SW-CMM level 4 last year) makes no
recommendations as to source language, and in fact the projects included in
the formal assessment used a variety of languages. Ada could potentially
assist in performing SW-CMM level 5 optimizing activities, however.