At 04:53 AM 1/8/01 +0100, Stephane Richard wrote:
>Hello everyone,
>
>I was wondering how Ada would measure up in creating the 2 following
>things:
>
>an OS (real time or not)
>
>a Graphical User interface (basically make my own windows for example).
>
>Any either past experiences, comments, suggestions and ideas are more than
>welcome.

Yes, as Wes pointed out, TopGraph'X has written X-windows 100% in Ada, and
a group are working on writing an OS in Ada.

Actually, taking full advantage of things like representation clauses and
the powerful set of other language features, it turns out that Ada is a
"natural" for low-level programming.  It takes somewhat of a mind shift to
get used to writing low-level code in Ada because most of us are so
accustomed to thinking in terms of high-level code.  And you probably will
never get over the somewhat unnerving fact that what you are writing is NOT
"portable", but machine-specific.  If you plan carefully, the
machine-dependencies can be kept to a minimum, and isolated in a very few
packages - possibly only one.  This one feature, alone, makes Ada superior
to C for low level programming.  In C it is virtually impossible to cleanly
isolate the machine-dependencies.

sro

S. Ron Oliver, semi-retired professor of Computer Science and Computer
Engineering.  www.csc.calpoly.edu/~sroliver

Tired of sucky software! ?  Check out www.caressCorp.com and follow the
links to software sucks and The Oliver Academy.