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From: "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Thickening Ada GTK or Vala Binding ?
Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2012 08:57:24 +0100
Organization: cbb software GmbH
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Date: 2012-12-28T08:57:24+01:00
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On Thu, 27 Dec 2012 13:53:27 -0800 (PST), Patrick wrote:

> "Glib is essential to Gtk. You cannot write anything more or less elaborated
> without using GObject, GValue, GList etc. "
> 
> You really should look at Vala then.

AFAIK, Vala is a kind of yet-another-curly-braces programming language...

> Actually I can program just fine with C GTK. I can also eat worms fine
> too. I just don't want to

Ada bindings cannot improve Gtk, I mean sufficiently. You cannot change the
architecture of Gtk. Granted, GtkAda could use controlled handles instead
of pointers hiding the ugly way reference counting is done in Glib. Signal
handlers could use Ada 2005 interfaces rather than being generic instances,
but still ... breaded worms are worms...

> Programming GTK using dynamic bindings is super simple, PyGtk is
> particularly easy. C is also fairly easy but it's like eating worms.

What is wrong with thin bindings then? If C is "fairly easy" then thin
bindings should be OK. (GtkAda is rather middle-level)

> I would love to be able to do what Vala has done for people who like the C
> family languages but for the Ada community.

Hmm, to my limited understanding Vala represents GObject classes at the
language level. GObject is poor man's OO, because C is not an OOPL. Vala is
supposed to be an OOPL. If so, GtkAda already did all that. Each Gtk class
has a corresponding Ada class (T'Class), each Gtk object has a tagged Ada
counterpart. Hierarchy of GObject classes is mapped onto a hierarchy of
tagged Ada types.

> Ada should not only be for journeymen programmers, it has a lot to offer
> to everyone, I think the community needs more people working to lower the
> very high barrier to accomplishing something with it on the desktop.

I don't believe that bindings to any GUI framework (Gtk, Qt, Win32 etc)
could be improved to achieve that.

But if you have concrete proposals the maintainers would certainly like to
hear them.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de