Communication between heterogeneous machines: A case study, implementation in Ada

In the computerized numerical control (CNC) project of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the authors have addressed the problem of communication between microcomputers of heterogeneous architecture. They present their experience in building such a communication interface. The points discussed are the kinds of services and hardware intended to be supported, the representation of the abstract packet data units, and the problem of data representation between microcomputers of heterogeneous architecture. For each of these points it is shown that some Ada-specific features are helpful for implementation