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From: Brian Drummond <brian@shapes.demon.co.uk>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: How to get Ada to =?iso-8859-13?Q?=B4cross_the_chasm=A1=3F?=
Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2018 23:01:08 -0000 (UTC)
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On Fri, 20 Apr 2018 06:44:43 -0700, Shark8 wrote:

> On Friday, April 20, 2018 at 7:25:41 AM UTC-6, Dan'l Miller wrote:
>> 
>> Also, we always talk about Ada+SPARK.  Why not Ada+VHDL, which is its
>> syntactic cousin, as a smooth and seamless programming environment for
>> FPGA development:  software and netmask in sibling languages?
> 
> If I had a good $30 Million or so, I'd totally drop it on hiring out for
> an Ada+VHDL IDE (not editor, environment) with:
> - An IR on the order of AIR or DIANA, though with database-storage as a
> consideration.
> - Implementation of the better-than-Continuous-Integration *AND*
> versioning solution described in this paper:
> http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?
doi=10.1.1.26.2533&rep=rep1&type=pdf
> - Written in 100% Ada; SPARK proving for the compiler-proper.
> - Modularized tools, such as pluggable backends.
> - Implementation of my Ada Project Manager solution, after rewriting it
> in pure Ada syntax.
> - Application of SPARK provers to VHDL.
> 
> And all the above means you could have provers on entire systems, H/W
> and S/W!

Formal methods have more traction in hardware (ASIC rather than FPGA) 
design, so VHDL users might be very open to a SPARK-like prover. 

Further, the restrictions placed on Ada to make it SPARK provable have a 
lot in common with the restrictions placed on VHDL to make it 
synthesisable, so there may well be some synergy there.

One thing I have (experimentally) used Ada for, was to code an algorithm 
in generic form, and instantiane in with both floating point (reference 
model) and various resolutions/ranges of fixed point, to prototype a 
hardware solution meeting specific accuracy goals. 

Ada's fixed point makes it a dream for DSP algorithm prototyping, before 
porting to VHDL and hardware. And this is a big market - EDA is in the 
billions with System-C and System-Verilog and other languages dedicated 
almost purely to hardware design verification; it could certainly support 
that sort of budget. Ada has a lot to offer here, especially with its 
cultural compatibility to VHDL.

Add SPARK/VHDL and you could be on to something.

-- Brian

-- Brian