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Subject: Re: is Ada used in James Webb Space Telescope software?
Date: Sun, 26 Dec 2021 16:37:00 -0800
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John McCabe <john@mccabe.org.uk> writes:
> I didn't realise there had been so many projects in Forth.

Much of Forth's early development was at the Kitt Peak observatory where
I think Charles Moore worked for a while, so it was popular with the
astronomy community and maybe indirectly with the spaceflight community
through there and JPL.  As a more general matter, hardware designers
(electrical engineers who sometimes have to muck with embedded software
but aren't really into programming as a topic) tend to like it because
of its simplicity and directness.

> as it looked like we (Matra Marconi Space) might be forced to use the
> RTX2010 as it was one of very few space qualified processors with
> hardware floating point support. In the end we used the MA31750, with
> Ada, instead.

Interesting.  I hadn't heard of the MA31750 but it appears to be a 16
bit processor that implements the MIL-STD-1750A instruction set(!),
which I didn't know about either.  Apparently it was made in the 1980s
but has since been superseded by SPARC architecture cpu's.

I wonder if targeting GCC to the RTX2010 might have been feasible.
Can I ask what Ada compiler you used for the MA31750?  It looks like GCC
supported the MA31750 until version 3.1, but I don't know whether GNAT
existed then.