On Fri, 6 Dec 1996, Michiel Perdeck wrote:
> I am gathering ammunition to propagate the use of Ada in my company
> (CMG plc)
Hear, hear, the competition is picking up, there goes our
competitive advantage...
:-)
<on tasking in the language definition>
> I think that
> the Ada approach has the great advantage of making it possible to
> formally specify (a program is a formal specification) the concurrency
> aspect of a system.
Well, in so far these aspects are covered by the ARM, and defined in the
implementation.
> But...
>
> How does the Ada tasking map to a particular operating system?
That depends on the compiler system you are using, and the OS you are
using. It's a bit difficult to map to, say, MS-DOS processes :-)
> Are there
> standard ways for this mapping in e.g. Unix (with and without
> lightweight processes),
Nope, certainly none you can absolutly rely on - I found this out the
hard way :-(
On my eg. Linux box GNAT tasks are implemented with the pthreads package,
but more and more I hear of Linuxers replacing it with linuxthreads.
> the well-know C/Unix constructs like fork/exec, does that have an
> equivalent in Ada?
Whatever makes you ask that ? If you stay withing the ARM, there's no
place for processes like this.
However, sometimes you do need them, what worked for me is using a Posix
binding (I used a forest subset). It lets me port code from NT to Linux
without a hitch (but note that this was fairly simple stuff).
> (And don't tell me that one can of course use OS calls in Ada.)
Ok, I won't :-))
+----------------+-------------------------------+
| Jerry van Dijk | [log in to unmask] |
| Consultant | Team Ada |
| Ordina Finance | Haarlem, Holland |
+----------------+-------------------------------+
|