Gem #112: Lego Mindstorms Ada Environment—Part 1

This series of Gems explores the GNAT Ada programming environment for the Lego Mindstorms robotics kit. The series will examine the high- and low-level interfaces to the hardware, the language subset supported by the underlying run-time library, and how to use the environment effectively. We’ll examine other topics as well. This first Gem introduces the general issue of the Ada language subset available to programmers and shows how the Ada interfaces address one specific aspect of that subset.

Gem #52: Scripting Capabilities in GNAT (Part 1)

Ada Gem #52 — Programming languages are, at least in the mind of most programmers, divided into two categories: scripting languages and others. The dividing line is not always obvious, and generally has to do with the size of the application, whether the language is interpreted or compiled, and whether doing operations such as manipulating external processes is easy.

It's safe to say, though, that Ada is almost never classified as a scripting language. This Gem demonstrates a few of the packages that are part of the GNAT distribution and that provide helpful scripting features to accomplish tasks that would often be thought to be in the domain of languages specialized for scripting. Portability is of course a major advantage of choosing Ada!