Re: Ada: A beginners experience

[blakemichael073@gmail.com]

On Saturday, July 14, 2018 at 7:26:21 PM UTC+8, Brian Drummond wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Jul 2018 20:53:13 -0700, blakemichael073 wrote:
> 
> > On Saturday, July 14, 2018 at 10:53:02 AM UTC+8, Dan'l Miller wrote:
> >> On Friday, July 13, 2018 at 9:36:32 PM UTC-5, blakemi...@gmail.com
> >> wrote:
> >> > At the moment I spend too much time trying understand how to make my
> >> > tools work, and not enough time using my tools.
> >> 
> >> Specifically what do you mean by “make the tools work”?  Do you spend
> >> 1) more time tweaking the command-line and build scripts and
> >> surrounding ecosystem, as getting exasperated trying to get the
> >> toolchain to work together (almost independent of
> >> Ada-the-language-per-se)
> >> or 2) more time having lengthy errors/warnings-from-compiler
> >> conversations with the GNAT compiler about Ada source code, as cycles
> >> of learning of learning Ada itself?
> > 
> > The first of the two options, well at least most of the time. An example
> > of the entry barrier level is the Inspirel tutorials for Ada on the
> > Cortex-M. I have tried many times to make this work, but so far I have
> > had no luck. (The author posts here so I will add that I have still
> > learnt a lot from the tutorial). This is the only beginner style
> > tutorial that I have found, but I have run into trouble with it.
> 
> First, thank you for persisting.
> 
> Second, what you are seeing is primarily the result of being one of 
> relatively few people going down this path; it's a vicious circle, 
> because there are relatively few peoplo on the path, there aren't many 
> good maps (tutorial examles, easy to install tools) and lots of weeds. 
> Which makes it harder to get started and puts off some people.
> 
> Third - I'd agree it's easier to learn the language itself on a desktop 
> environment, but I don't agree you have to put the STM32 aside for very 
> long. You can combine both approaches with some advantage, and it will 
> stand you in good stead in the longer term.
> 
> For example, you can write a loop
> 
> loop
>    Wait(1.0);
>    Led_On;
>    Wait(1.0);
>    Led_Off;
> end loop;
> 
> and test it with procedures like
> 
> procedure Led_On is
> begin
>    Ada.Text_IO.Put_line("LED is ON");
> end Led_On;
> 
> (and use the Delay subprogram for Wait)
> 
> and compile and test it on the desktop.
> 
> Put the subprograms in a package and write two package bodies; one which 
> works on the desktop as above, and one which works on the STM32 (or 
> Arduino, or MSP430 [1]). Packages are basic and very useful, worth 
> learning early.
> 
> Then learn enough about the build system (either Gnatmake or Gprbuild) to 
> compile either package body and link for either target, and you are well 
> on the way to keeping your code easily portable to other targets.
> 
> For serious large scale control applications, you'll need to learn 
> tasking, as Dmitry says (more likely a subset of full tasking like the 
> Ravenscar profile), but you can go quite a long way before that stage.
> And again that's easier if you prototype on the desktop and move to the 
> micro once it's working.
> 
> Just some suggestions for getting started.
> 
> -- Brian
> 
> [1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/msp430ada/
> Not easy to install, and seriously needs updating...

My learning approach at the moment is to work on learning Ada programming on application type programming from some of the books available. The adacraft book by John English has been very good,  I started with Andrew Schvets Introduction to Ada Programming and there are other good resources out there. 
 My interest is particularly in real time systems, and I thought that starting with micro-controllers would be a good place to start. It would give me a good understanding of interacting with the hardware as well as building my programming skills. So for the moment I will most likely try to learn these skills in C for a while which is well supported, and try to cross reference to Ada when I can. I did look at rtems as a possible learning platform for real time systems (they have google summer of code students after all) and could not get access to their email forum, so I am already light years ahead here.
 
Mike Blake