1. Egészségedre
or incoherent memories of a programmer of Ada in Ada
After a couple of years of effort of the department of languages and compilers, we verified in practice that
the development of an Ada compiler for 16-bit SMEP computers in Pascal probably would not lead to the
desired goal. But it was only a warm up for a project one meets once in a lifetime.
In the mid 80's of the last century, Ada teams of Office Machines Prague (Kancelářské stroje Praha) and SzKI
Budapest (Számítástechnikai Kutató Intézet és Innovációs Központ – I still remember the name) joined their
efforts to develop a universal compilation system of the Ada language for various development and target
environments.
Before the first trip, I was pretty nervous. "AB служебная" was shining from the new passport and we were
waiting in Ruzyně airport for a flight to Budapest. The chief Jarda, Karel and me. We boarded the plane
orderly and in a timely manner on the first try. On subsequent trips, of which we had tens during
approximately five years, we spent our time before the flight in the airport bar (although even then the
price of beer was ungodly expensive) and gradually we ignored the calls, last calls and the very last calls for
boarding. When we discovered that the aircraft without passengers who had passed through check-in
would not depart, we were waiting for a call for boarding by names. Obviously they remembered us
because they came several times to the bar without much hesitation to pick us up in person. Definitely, do
not try this today - no aircraft will be waiting for you!
A big challenge was the language preparation. While Karel relied on a project official language - English,
Jarda enrolled in courses of Hungarian, and I bought a pocket handbook of English conversation for
Hungarians, from which I learned a couple of basic phrases. But when it came to communicating in
Hungarian, we all were approximately on the same level.
Already during the first visit we discovered a bodega (borozó), more fitting would probably be a wine bar,
where for funny money they were selling Welschriesling and Lemberger from cans sunk into the dispensing
counter served by scoops that reminded me of the sale of milk in my childhood. Despite not very enticing
environment, the wine was good and we often returned to the taproom. And this lasted until we found that
for a comparable price we could have wine in many other, much friendlier wine bars. And they always had
zsíros kenyér there with the wine - a huge slice of bread with lard and onion, our most favorite food.
Good beer was hard to find in those days in Hungary. We solved this by import - our suitcases contained
almost exclusively the stacks of paper with program listings - and bottles of beer. Jarda bought a special
rigid leather bag for beer as cabin baggage (then it was possible…). In Budapest, we found several pubs,
which argued that they had Pilsner on tap. In all cases the taste of beer was far from that of Pilsner Urquell.
One day it occurred to me that this may be because of the strange way of tapping, and so I tried to teach at
least something to the waitress using my broken Hungarian. In return for the generous efforts to transmit
information we did not get any more beer, even after a reminder, and we did not dare to return to that pub
ever again.
In Budapest, however, we cared not only for our taste buds, but also for cultural advancement. We saw
a lot of movies somehow not distributed at those times in Czechoslovakia. Understanding of dialogues was
rather poor. The top were certainly Bergman's movies in the original, with Hungarian subtitles. I was
personally most interested in the performance of the rock opera István a király (King Stephen) in Budapest's
National Theatre. I still have two-disk recordings on vinyl and on CD.
I took Hasek's “The Good Soldier Schweik” with me from home quite regularly. And we read especially
about Schweik's events in Királyhida.
At the time of our visit, the Formula 1 races started in Hungaroring. Jarda procured a ticket for a price
comparable to our monthly income and set out on his way on Sunday early morning. Karel and I put a few

2. bottles of sparkling wine in the refrigerator and waited for the race. The live television transmission was
hilarious, we saw all the key moments of the race repeatedly and the bottles of bubbly were pleasant
companions. Jarda returned late in the evening -hungry, thirsty, physically out. We then had to tell him how
the competition had run and who won.
Together there were about 10 of us in both teams. The number of workstations connected to the small
MicroVAX II was less. To avoid clashes and to utilize machine time, we often worked in shifts - Hungarians
in the morning, us in the afternoon and at night. And also on Saturday and Sunday, often 12 hours or more
in a row. The MicroVAX was running absolutely reliably, labor productivity was unprecedented for us up to
that point. When we returned to Prague after two weeks, we tried for a month to launch the results of our
efforts on a SM 52/12. Mostly in vain, as Bulgarian disk drives were not capable of running more than
20 minutes without a failure.
In the Ada language, because of its relative complexity, the ability of quick execution was often questioned.
Therefore, we compared a couple of language compilers for Ada, Pascal and C. As expected, the favorite C
won, also thanks to the fact that executable programs contained no checks during runtime, unlike Ada and
Pascal, which showed comparable results.
After a couple of years of effort, in 1989, we were finally able to introduce the first full implementation of
the Ada language in the Eastern Bloc - SSAdaP (Support System for Ada Programmers). The system,
developed in VMS Ada, worked in the VAX/VMS and IBM/OS environment, a version for UNIX was under
preparation. We were proud of the implementation of generic units without the usual simplifications
(Jarda) and expansion modules for unlimited precision arithmetic and process simulation (Karel).
The weight of the original SAdaP documentation was 6 kg and it was accompanied by Czech User Manual
for the SM 52/12 (yes, we finally managed to run it). Special publications described generic units and error
messages with cross-references.
We presented SSAdaP at seminars and conferences, and in scientific journals. In September 1989,
I presented SSAdaP in The Hague at the DECUS European Symposium. The lecture aroused interest, but the
response to suggestions of possible cooperation was cold. This was in contrast to the US government Ada
Joint Program Office, which provided us with Ada materials over the years. It was a disappointment.
An unforgettable experience was a visit to Moscow. One summer day, Jarda came and gave me and Karel
the authorization to organize and participate in joint meetings with the Russians and Hungarians. And then
he left for climbing in the mountains for a month. We had service passports, we booked seats on the plane,
but a problem occurred – there was no chance to get rubles to travel. I found that the only ones having no
problems exchanging rubles were the members of the Czechoslovak-Soviet Chamber of Commerce
(perhaps I remember the name of the organization well). So I convinced the economic director of
Kancelářské stroje to sign a registration form and pay the membership fees. Although I already felt distress
when crossing the Czechoslovak border, negotiations went well and, with a number of (hopefully) non-
recurring memories, we could report completion of the task to Jarda. And because of the activity with the
Chamber of Commerce, I was gradually called on the carpet by the chiefs, until I ended up with the Director
General. To this day, I am still proud of it!
In Czechoslovakia I remember the implementation of SSAdaP for Czech Technical University and the army.
In Hungary, the system also had several implementations, especially in the academic environment. After
1990, however, further development and maintenance of the system was stopped, and with the gradual
degradation of Western export control, there were suddenly Ada compilers available from all around the
world. I liquidated the distribution tapes a few years ago, so after 25 years of we were left with only
documentation, technical publications, and especially the memories of an amazing international project.
Jan Holý, 2015