On Sun, 29 Jun 2003 14:37:23 -0400, you wrote:
>We decided to continue
>development in Pascal using a source to source translator so that our =
code
>could be compiled with whatever the best compiler was on each platform,
>which was C in most cases.
>
Interesting approach. I use Delphi for the Windoze stuff, which generally
communicates with embedded systems using ethernet or serial. For a =
datalogger
I took the Delphi code and converted it to Borland Pascal 7 to run on a
PC104 board running DRDOS. In general it was pretty simple, most of the
changes were do to the multi-threaded kernel that ran on top of DRDOS and
writing runtime support routines, such as as inttostr, that are in Delphi
but not BP7.

In another case we simulated much of a ADSP-2189 based system using a
68020 system written in OmegaSoft Pascal. When we got closer to actual
hardware, the translation started to C, since that is the only thing =
other
than assembler available for that chip. I used a program running under =
linux
to convert data structures, but didn't let it touch the code, I wanted to
keep it as much like Pascal as possible, the preprocessor came in handy =
for
that. Again, language translation was simpler than environment =
translation,
especially since the ADSP-2189 can't access a byte, only multiple of 16 =
bit
words. Fortunately I knew this when I started writing the simulator so
avoided bytes as much as possible. In those cases where I couldn't, I had
to define two bytes as one word, and build or split them apart in code.

We are coming up to a similar situation later this year. We are going to =
make
a new version of the datalogger using a ADSP-2188 (unless Analog Devices
comes out with a usable version of a ADSP-219x before then) starting with
the code that now runs under DRDOS and BP7. I'm thinking that an =
automatic
translation would have real trouble with the "16 bit word access" only =
situation.
Any thoughts?

Bob Reimiller

--
http://www.piclist.com#nomail Going offline? Don't AutoReply us!
email listserv@mitvma.mit.edu with SET PICList DIGEST in the body