Ada (GNAT) and GNU Scientific Library

Ada (GNAT) and GNU Scientific Library

[Reinert Korsnes]

Any hint on how an Ada programmer (using linux) can use
GNU Scientific Library ?

reinert

Re: Ada (GNAT) and GNU Scientific Library

[Ludovic Brenta]

Reinert Korsnes writes:
> Any hint on how an Ada programmer (using linux) can use GNU
> Scientific Library ?

There is currently no Ada binding, and you are welcome to create one.
You could start with a thin binding to the few subprograms you need,
publish it on Sourceforge, Savannah, Tigris or Belios, and invite
other people to join in.

PS. This topic was discussed on November 1st on this newsgroup; please
search the archives if you want to know who else is interested :)

PPS. Adrian Wrigley might be willing to publish his few thin bindings
under the GPL, as a starting point?

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.

Re: Ada (GNAT) and GNU Scientific Library

[brian.b.mcguinness]

Ludovic Brenta wrote:
> Reinert Korsnes writes:
> > Any hint on how an Ada programmer (using linux) can use GNU
> > Scientific Library ?
>
> There is currently no Ada binding, and you are welcome to create one.
> You could start with a thin binding to the few subprograms you need,
> publish it on Sourceforge, Savannah, Tigris or Belios, and invite
> other people to join in.
>
> PS. This topic was discussed on November 1st on this newsgroup; please
> search the archives if you want to know who else is interested :)
>
> PPS. Adrian Wrigley might be willing to publish his few thin bindings
> under the GPL, as a starting point?
>
> --
> Ludovic Brenta.

I would think that it would be more useful to translate the library to
Ada
as a generic package, so any floating type could be used, but of
course it would then be necessary to maintain synchronization
with the original version.

--- Brian

Re: Ada (GNAT) and GNU Scientific Library

[george]

brian.b.mcguinness@lmco.com wrote:
> I would think that it would be more useful to translate the library to
> Ada
> as a generic package, so any floating type could be used, but of
> course it would then be necessary to maintain synchronization
> with the original version.
Which may not be such a trivial thing to do:

aldar portage # cat sci-libs/gsl/ChangeLog|grep \*
*gsl-1.8 (11 Apr 2006)
*gsl-1.7 (14 Oct 2005)
*gsl-1.6 (16 Jan 2005)
*gsl-1.4 (28 Dec 2004)
*gsl-1.4 (18 Nov 2003)
*gsl-1.1.1 (12 Jun 2003)
*gsl-1.3 (14 Feb 2003)
*gsl-1.2 (06 Aug 2002)
*gsl-1.0 (1 Feb 2002)

Expect two new releases per year on average. If anybody is ready to
undertake this, sure, but I think the more realistic aim would be to
have a binding..

George

Re: Ada (GNAT) and GNU Scientific Library

[Dr. Adrian Wrigley]

On Fri, 17 Nov 2006 13:28:23 -0800, george wrote:

> brian.b.mcguinness@lmco.com wrote:
>> I would think that it would be more useful to translate the library to
>> Ada
>> as a generic package, so any floating type could be used, but of
>> course it would then be necessary to maintain synchronization
>> with the original version.
> Which may not be such a trivial thing to do:
> 
> aldar portage # cat sci-libs/gsl/ChangeLog|grep \*
> *gsl-1.8 (11 Apr 2006)
> *gsl-1.7 (14 Oct 2005)
> *gsl-1.6 (16 Jan 2005)
> *gsl-1.4 (28 Dec 2004)
> *gsl-1.4 (18 Nov 2003)
> *gsl-1.1.1 (12 Jun 2003)
> *gsl-1.3 (14 Feb 2003)
> *gsl-1.2 (06 Aug 2002)
> *gsl-1.0 (1 Feb 2002)
> 
> Expect two new releases per year on average. If anybody is ready to
> undertake this, sure, but I think the more realistic aim would be to
> have a binding..

Yes.  Brian's comment suggests translating the package in order to
make the floating type generic(?).  Surely this isn't necessary?
The most you would want is a thick binding which chose the GSL code
for single or double precision according to the precision of the
generic parameter.  Gnat *may* be able to optimise the instance
to eliminate any dead code.

And since my name was mentioned higher up the thread, I'm not planning
on digging out the few bindings that I made for public use - they were
coded without much thought, just to try out GSL in my application. I
didn't use them in the end because the routines didn't meet my needs at
the time. Perhaps in the future, I will try again, because my needs and
the GSL have changed and expanded significantly.

A decent binding would probably best work out if someone in the Ada
community was actually using GSL in Ada regularly, since they
would have working, maintained code as a base.  If that's where
my coding is likely to go, I'll seriously consider putting it
on a public license from the start.
--
Adrian

Re: Ada (GNAT) and GNU Scientific Library

[george]

On a related note, I recently "resurrected" the cbind package. It was
one of the packages we had in portage (that's Gentoo) and which I did
not, at the time, update yet. The usual search however did not turn up
any update information. In fact all the references I found were
pointing at the location which now look dead (If anybody can give me
any pointers to anything  "official" I'd be gratefull to hear of
course). Fortunately we still had the sources on our mirrors, so I
somewhat cleaned them up and repackaged (I don't remember all the
details right now, minor stuff mostly. Most notably, I converted some
script from csh to bash, in order not to force tcsh dependency just for
one 20-liner. The rest was trivial IIRC (not that even that was hard
:))). If anybody is interested to have it you can get the repackaged
sources here:
http://dev.gentoo.org/~george/src/cbind-6.0.tar.bz2
or on any of our mirrors. Just run make to build, it only needs gcc and
make AFAICT. I intend to keep it for as long as I can "maintain" it. I
briefly tested it on some .c file - incidentally that was my attempt to
test some gsl function :), and it seemed to spit some reasonably
looking code for some gsl header file. Although I did not test this
further at the time.

There were also announcements of an ongoing effort to produce a SWIG
module, however my understanding is that is not yet finished (and IIRC
it aims at C++ bindings). Meanwhile you can try throwing cbind at the
task - it may help produce some bindings at least for the needed
functions.

George


Dr. Adrian Wrigley wrote:
> A decent binding would probably best work out if someone in the Ada
> community was actually using GSL in Ada regularly, since they
> would have working, maintained code as a base.  If that's where
> my coding is likely to go, I'll seriously consider putting it
> on a public license from the start.
> Adrian

Re: Ada (GNAT) and GNU Scientific Library

[Jeffrey Creem]

george@gentoo.org wrote:
> On a related note, I recently "resurrected" the cbind package. It was
> one of the packages we had in portage (that's Gentoo) and which I did
> not, at the time, update yet. The usual search however did not turn up
> any update information. In fact all the references I found were
> pointing at the location which now look dead (If anybody can give me
> any pointers to anything  "official" I'd be gratefull to hear of
> course). Fortunately we still had the sources on our mirrors, so I
> somewhat cleaned them up and repackaged (I don't remember all the
> details right now, minor stuff mostly. Most notably, I converted some
> script from csh to bash, in order not to force tcsh dependency just for
> one 20-liner. The rest was trivial IIRC (not that even that was hard
> :))). If anybody is interested to have it you can get the repackaged
> sources here:
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~george/src/cbind-6.0.tar.bz2
> or on any of our mirrors. Just run make to build, it only needs gcc and
> make AFAICT. I intend to keep it for as long as I can "maintain" it. I
> briefly tested it on some .c file - incidentally that was my attempt to
> test some gsl function :), and it seemed to spit some reasonably
> looking code for some gsl header file. Although I did not test this
> further at the time.
> 
> There were also announcements of an ongoing effort to produce a SWIG
> module, however my understanding is that is not yet finished (and IIRC
> it aims at C++ bindings). Meanwhile you can try throwing cbind at the
> task - it may help produce some bindings at least for the needed
> functions.
> 

Actually, SWIG will bind to more than just C++. It really is a N-way 
language binding generator. I've not checked the progress recently (the 
work is being done in the SVN repository of of the GNUAda project on 
sourceforge)..

Re: Ada (GNAT) and GNU Scientific Library

[Jerry]

george@gentoo.org wrote:
> On a related note, I recently "resurrected" the cbind package.

How is cbind related to c2ada at
http://www.adahome.com/Resources/Tools/Non-Commercial.html? According
to that page, "This tool, released by Intermetrics, is based on cbind
(Ada-to-C binding generator), a tool previously made public by Rational
Software Corporation."

Jerry

Re: Ada (GNAT) and GNU Scientific Library

[rodkay]

Jeffrey Creem wrote:
> george@gentoo.org wrote:
> > There were also announcements of an ongoing effort to produce a SWIG
> > module, however my understanding is that is not yet finished (and IIRC
> > it aims at C++ bindings).
>
> Actually, SWIG will bind to more than just C++. It really is a N-way
> language binding generator. I've not checked the progress recently (the
> work is being done in the SVN repository of of the GNUAda project on
> sourceforge).

   The SWIG ada & gnat modules should both handle C, as well.

   Apologies to anyone who has tried to download SWIG from the GNUAda
project recently. There have not been any updates for some time.
Hopefully a batch of updates will go into svn within the next few days.

   Apologies also to anyone attempting contact at my former email
address.

   I've made a small start on a SWIG/gnat interface file for the GSL.
Currently, only 'block's and 'vector's are covered, although adding the
rest should not prove too difficult. Also, file IO functions have been
'ignored' (are not available), since the SWIG/gnat module does not cope
with these at the moment.

   The sample GSL binding is available via ...

             svn co svn://58.163.88.116/anvil/gsl

... and contains the SWIG interface file, a set of pre-generated
bindings, and a small test harness.


    To build the test harness or use the bindings, you also need a
single 'swig.ads' file ...

             svn co
svn://58.163.88.116/anvil/contrib/trunk/source/swig.ads


   The bindings have been tested with gnat-gpl-2006 on Linux, although
not extensively.



regards.

Re: Ada (GNAT) and GNU Scientific Library

[george]

Unfortunately I don't know any more than that. I only learned about
this connection from the very text you cite. Moreover, it looks like
both projects are now dead - neither of the sites even resolves any
more. However I just found c2ada source on my hard drive. Apparently I
managed to find it somewhere some time ago (I only remember searching
for it about a year ago and not finding..). A quick look into its
contents shows, that there are some files that I saw in cbind, so the
claim indeed seems to be valid. However this is all I can say on this
matter.

George

Jerry wrote:
> george@gentoo.org wrote:
> > On a related note, I recently "resurrected" the cbind package.
>
> How is cbind related to c2ada at
> http://www.adahome.com/Resources/Tools/Non-Commercial.html? According
> to that page, "This tool, released by Intermetrics, is based on cbind
> (Ada-to-C binding generator), a tool previously made public by Rational
> Software Corporation."
> 
> Jerry

Re: Ada (GNAT) and GNU Scientific Library

[Jerry]

I tried to use c2ada and it had a problem. I started digging into it
and quickly found myself in over my C-head, but it looked like a minor
problem that could probably be fixed by someone who knows a bit more
than me about C.

I had a brief exchange only a few months ago with a guy who I think was
an author. I've found the e-mail and I'll paste it below and try to
mangle his name and e-mail address a bit.

======= begin pasted e-mail =========
From: D e r e k M J o n e s <xxxx>

d  e  k  s  .  .
 e  k  n  o  c  u
  r  @  o  f  o  k
 (mangled by Jerry)

Date: June 5, 2006 3:48:46 AM MST
To:
Subject: Re: About your article, Translating C to Ada

Jerry,

> I've just found your article, Translating C to Ada, at http://
> www.knosof.co.uk/ctoa.html, being in need of something to ease the
> work of making an Ada binding for PLplot, which is of course
> written in C. For this particular project I am only translating
> header files.
> I'm wondering what the state of the translator is, and if it might
> be available on unix (actually Macintosh OS X).

The translator exists in design only.  It would probably be possible
to rework the output routines to handle enough to deal with headers.
However, interest has been low and there are always other more pressing
things that keep cropping up.

Thanks for your interest, I will let you know if things change.

--
D e r e k M . J o n e s
Knowledge Software Ltd                      mailto: xxxx
Applications Standards Conformance Testing    http://www.knosof.co.uk


======= end pasted e-mail =========

This is a _very_substantial_ piece of work and should not be lost. I've
learned a bit of C since I last looked at it so maybe sometime I'll
have another go at it.

Jerry

george@gentoo.org wrote:
> Unfortunately I don't know any more than that. I only learned about
> this connection from the very text you cite. Moreover, it looks like
> both projects are now dead - neither of the sites even resolves any
> more. However I just found c2ada source on my hard drive. Apparently I
> managed to find it somewhere some time ago (I only remember searching
> for it about a year ago and not finding..). A quick look into its
> contents shows, that there are some files that I saw in cbind, so the
> claim indeed seems to be valid. However this is all I can say on this
> matter.
>
> George
>
> Jerry wrote:
> > george@gentoo.org wrote:
> > > On a related note, I recently "resurrected" the cbind package.
> >
> > How is cbind related to c2ada at
> > http://www.adahome.com/Resources/Tools/Non-Commercial.html? According
> > to that page, "This tool, released by Intermetrics, is based on cbind
> > (Ada-to-C binding generator), a tool previously made public by Rational
> > Software Corporation."
> > 
> > Jerry