Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Sure. But, for example, take a look at the list of things that Ada defines
> how to do that C doesn't that would be useful for kernels:
>
> Interrupt hooking, interrupt prioritization, interrupt disabling while
> running a higher-priority interrupt. Packed structures where you can define
> what and where every bit goes. Switching stacks (as in, context switching).
> Atomically writing to memory-mapped hardware. Test-and-set. Dynamically
> loading code and then executing it. Mapping data structures to particular
> addresses. Well-defined language structures for inline assembler. Plus
> everything C++ does (including interfacing to other calling conventions)
> except maybe turing complete templates. :-)

An interesting thought here:

How high is the influence of the most favorite programming languages on the
further development hardware design?

> As I said, lots of kernels are written in FORTH (for small machines) or Ada
> (for dangerous machines).

Maybe the latter is somewhat comforting. Not that the pure *existence* of
dangerous machines would be.

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