From: jonathan on

More on GNAT AVR at:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/avr-ada/index.php?title=Tutorial

J.
From: Britt Snodgrass on
In case that tinyrul link doesn't work, its supposed to point to an
IEEE paper abstract at

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/4926138/5090609/05090914.pdf%3Farnumber%3D5090914&authDecision=-203

that I found with a Google search for "avr32 gnat ada"

- Britt
From: usenet on
On Jul 18, 3:15 am, Simon Wright <si...(a)pushface.org> wrote:
> use...(a)scriptoriumdesigns.com writes:
> > I think getting an easy-to-use Ada on AVR (a nice and easy to obtain
> > chip, and available in DIP for budget prototyping) would be great.
> > Any form of tasking would probably be too much to ask, but maybe not
> > on the bigger members of the family.
>
> GNAT GPL 2010 mentions AVR --http://libre.adacore.com/libre/tools/gnat-gpl-edition/

I'm downloading it now and will give it a test drive. Maybe I can
work up an interesting little example to post on avrfreaks.org.
From: MRE on
On 17 Jul., 11:46, "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mail...(a)dmitry-kazakov.de>
wrote:

> But you (education) have time, resources and continuity we (mid-sized
> industry) cannot even dream of.

No, I don't. I am not quite sure where those nice job descriptions for
profs come
from. Every time I read one of those (lots of free time, pursuing
their hobbies,
making huge amounts of money...) I go: "yes, I want one of those jobs,
why don't I have it?".
Reality looks quite different. And: Software development tools ARE NOT
MY JOB!
I can use good ole C for most of what I am doing, so why would my dean
give
me money to do some work on / in Ada? I have not published anything
about language
design, compiler design or any related field, so neither the state,
nor the federal
government nor the European Community is going to fork money my way to
develop a couple
of nice FREE cross compilers.

Have you ever taken a look at what the state of the art is in CS as
compared to
state of the practice? Why do we have all these nice papers
circulating, telling us
how easy it is to develop software -using this or that lanugage,
method etc.-
when we are still using a 40+ years language like C as a standard?

If you wait for universities to drive software-technology, then you'll
get a lot
of quantum-leaps, i.e. you'll most probably not like the direction.
Research goes
where the money is. Pure research in the technical fields -among them
CS- has become
extremely rare.

I've been in the "industry" for quite some time and know how the
blokes in the
avionics business work. I've been working for people for started a new
project in C
because the Ada cross-compiler cost twice as much as the one for C
(Productivity? Never
heard that this will depend on the progrmaming language!). I've
watched
tool vendors try to sell the newest fad (my favourite here being Real-
Time "Java"
for safety-critical systems!) and then go down the drain in ever
tightening spirals.
Why are there so many C compiler vendors out there as opposed to a
very small (and
declining) number of Ada vendors? Because of the universities not
doing research?
I don't think so!

It's the users, the companies that make money by buying tools and
selling software
that have the leverage. They have the money. True: this will not
always hold for SMEs.
From: MRE on
On 17 Jul., 18:29, Georg Bauhaus <rm-host.bauh...(a)maps.futureapps.de>
wrote:
> On 7/17/10 10:45 AM, MRE wrote:
>
> > Personally I have a
> > project up and
> > running where three of my students write code in Ada for AVR (8-Bit
> > and 32-Bit).
> > You can find decent Ada cross-compilers for both and that's what I
> > use.
>
> > If you ask me however to do a similar thing for say MSP430, sorry I
> > can't. I don't
> > have a clue how to generate the cross-compiler for Ada and I don't
> > know how to
> > write / adapt the Ravenscar-Runtime. Furthermore I just don't have the
> > time to lern
> > it and I lack the ressources to have my students do it.
>
> Is there, in your view, a way to approach the subject as
> a cooperative effort, touchy as it may be, with the simpler
> goal of gradually improving an AVR run-time system and the tools?
> Maybe making it portable where possible so more vendors
> become interested?
>
> If PR noise and bureaucratic overhead have shown to be
> counterproductive, maybe occasional produce from here
> and there is more effective in helping the effort catch on.
> An AVR teaching environment could then become visible even
> on the radar of those departments where a preference is
> for more abstract computer models.

In fact yes. I am currently trying to get a tool vendor to support
a research proposal in that direction. Still: my ressources are
restricted. Sigh!