From: Bob Leif
To: Team-Ada
Electronic Design, May 27, 2002, has an article "Write Once Debug
Everywhere. Code portability is the key to diverse application platforms
and application migration", by William Wong. Mr. Wong is one of
Electronic Design's Technology Editors. His article did not mention Ada.
Thus it provoked the following letter from me and I hope one from many
of you.

Electronic Design is a successful magazine with a large number of
advertisers. Its readers include many potential Ada users including
those who program embedded systems.

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To: [log in to unmask]; [log in to unmask]
Subject: Write Once, Debug Everywhere

I totally agree that "Code portability is the key to diverse application
platforms and application migration." Unfortunately, your articled never
mentioned that the best way to achieve this is to use Ada (ISO/IEC
8652:1995). The Ada Conformity Assessment process rigorously tests the
Ada programming language against the ISO standard.
(http://www.adaic.com/compilers/testing.html).

The article states, "Embedded C++ (EC++) is one common subsets that
works with compilers from a number of companies," "It eliminates
advanced features like multiple inheritance and templates." Firstly,
multiple inheritance was not an advanced feature; it was a disaster. Ada
generics (templates) have been exceedingly useful since the inception of
the language and when combined with Ada tagged types (classes) permit
modeling of common electronic components, such as input and output
ports. These can easily be instantiated for computers with different
size words. There is a free Ada GNU compiler, GNAT, which can be
downloaded from ftp://ftp.cs.nyu.edu/pub/gnat/ For more information,
please see http://www.adaic.com and/or http://www.acm.org/sigada/

Ada has the benefits of: a Pascal based easy to read syntax, which
includes strong typing; portability; both generic and class based
inheritance; low level capabilities equivalent to those of C; compilers
that produce executables and/or J codes; real-time operations being
included in the language; a hierarchical library system; and an
unsurpassed track record for reliability.

From: Robert C. Leif, Ph.D.
Vice President
Newport Instruments