Windows NT and Ada

[usenet.coe.montana.edu!mtvms2.mtech.edu!MGPOOLE@decwrl.dec.com]

     I would like to respond to Mr. Aharonian's posting (on Aug 2) concerning
Microsoft's Windows NT undermining ADA.  I disagree.  I feel that WinNT will
provide a big boost to the Ada software world and to the software world in
general.  Having a flat 32-bit address space to program in as opposed to
fussing with 64k code/data spaces will be a major plus.  A second plus will be
the hardware independence (freedom from Intel!).

     The fact that WinNT is written in C/C++ isn't relevant.  After all, the
run-time windows DLLs are binary which can thus be accessed by anyone; COBOL,
Fortran, PASCAL and even ADA.  Both Meridian and RR Software have Windows
interfaces but I don't know how good they are.  If one looks at windows
programming books, one sees things like

      long FAR PASCAL WndProc( .... )

Thus the calling convention of windows follows that of Fortran/Pascal/Ada as
opposed to that of C.  I have seen somewhere that Ada9X will make it easier
to interface to Windows; could someone out there comment on this.

     A major problem with WinNT is that it is still Windows.  But it does have
a DOS box so that one can then pretend that the windows interface doesn't
exist.  I should point out that I am strictly neutral on the issue of Microsoft
vs the rest of the software world.  One sees references to "the Evil Empire"
and to "the Oceanside Borg", I don't think this is the proper forum for this.


Michael G. Poole
Dept of Math Sci/Comp Sci
Montana College of Mineral Science and Technology
Butte, Montana
email:  @mgpoole@mtvms2.mtech.edu
phone:  1-406-496-4362
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