From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.6 (2021-04-09) on ip-172-31-74-118.ec2.internal X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-2.9 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_00,NICE_REPLY_A autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.6 Path: eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!news.szaf.org!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Niklas Holsti Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: is Ada used in James Webb Space Telescope software? Date: Mon, 27 Dec 2021 09:44:26 +0200 Organization: Tidorum Ltd Message-ID: References: <87tuevtblb.fsf@nightsong.com> <19527aed-3b3a-44c2-acc8-2221dbc7a3b6n@googlegroups.com> <87pmpiubmb.fsf@nightsong.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: individual.net uSpmu7HUv04U851ZI4ZHTQiG8D80cR5BfwxKy4wgqP3+L2/ThH Cancel-Lock: sha1:gaxmSPNjzM/E9D94ap5qU4n8ktQ= User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.14; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/78.14.0 In-Reply-To: <87pmpiubmb.fsf@nightsong.com> Content-Language: en-US Xref: reader02.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:63272 List-Id: On 2021-12-27 2:37, Paul Rubin wrote: > John McCabe 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. Forth is of course one of the few ways to get a self-hosted but fairly fast interactive compiler/editor system on small processors. In the 1980's I was working in radio astronomy and we were planning to use Forth to replace HP BASIC on an HP2100 16-bit mini for telescope control and data acquisition. I had a little crush on Forth at the time, but fell out of love with it when I found that some astronomy SW had defined the word 2000.0 as a procedure to convert stellar coordinates to the year 2000 ephemeris... very clear :-( Fortunately IMO we chose to use HP-Algol instead, and much later changed to Ada on a MicroVAX. >> 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. Like John, I used Ada on an MA31750. We used the TLD Ada compiler, where (IIRC) TLD stands for the main author, Terry L. Dunbar. GNAT was around, but I don't remember if it had support for the MA31750 -- I doubt it. We used gnatp 3. for testing the MA31750 SW on workstations (Sun Solaris on SPARC, IIRC), but the customer (Matra Marconi Space) specified TLD Ada for the target, so there was never a question of using GNAT instead. That project developed the on-board SW for the ozone-monitoring instrument GOMOS on the ESA ENVISAT satellite. I believe ENVISAT used MA31750 and TLD Ada for all its systems.