Re: GNAT for NT Linking Problem

[Klaus Wyss <klaus.wyss@ubs.com>]

Michael Feldman wrote:
 
> Since you are porting to GNAT, why not take the opportunity to
> Ada 95-ize your program and get away from using those C libraries.
> For example, toupper, etc., are part of the Ada 95 standard libs,
> in this case Ada.Characters.Handling.
> 
> And why use the C IO routines? Is there a problem with Ada.Text_IO?
> 
> >Gnat uses some of the stdio routines to implement Ada file-io.
> >Look in the 'adaincludes' directory for i-cstrea.ads
> >and you find what is available via Gnat. If you need more you would
> >have to include these interfaces yourself via some library or .obj
> >file.
> 
> All this is true, but maybe you should have a look at your code to
> see if you can make use of Ada 95 stuff that will free you from
> (most of) the C lib facilities.
> 
> The only thing I can think of that would require the C libs is if
> (possibly) those f* routines are unbuffered. Do you need unbuffered
> input/output?
> 
> Mike Feldman


                                                                     
That's a typical sugestion of somebody living in the pure clean Ada
world
But the real world is not clean. It has dirty things like Windows,OLE
3rd party libraries .....
                                                                    
It would be crazy the reimplent all that stuff (maybe people in the
military aerea can do that)
                                                          
So what we need is a quick way to access all this C stuff from Ada.
A standard way to take C or C++ headers and make the this modules
acessible in Ada. 
                                                                
If we don't be able to access all this C,C++ things in a elegant simple
way, more and more applications will change from Ada to C/C++. 
The greater productivity of Ada programming doesn't help me if i lose
the time in solving the interface problems to other libraries.

Klaus Wyss
Union Bank of Switzerland