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 | +----------------+-------------------------------+