Re: GNAT for NT Linking Problem

[Matt O'Hara <matthew.h.ohara@lmco.com>]

> 
> Michael Feldman wrote:
>

Michael -

Sorry; I started this topic and then got pulled away from it.
 
> > 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.
> >

I have started to do this, although I have discovered a limitation with
Ada95 that I did not care for. See the next response...

> > And why use the C IO routines? Is there a problem with Ada.Text_IO?
> >
> > 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?
> >

We used the C IO routines because Ada 83 Text IO (which the original
code was based on) could not handle Japanese (Wide) characters, and we
needed to Internationalize our program. Since we were Solaris based, and
Solaris has all these nice, neat Wide libraries, we simply built our own
text_io replacement package which used our own wide_character types, and
interfaced to the Solaris C wide libraries.

Ada 95 does have wide_character functions, including I/O. Although I am
still playing around with converting this to Ada95, I have noticed that
its Wide_Io does not handle wide_character file/path names; they are
String only. This seems like an unnecessary restriction; the wide_io
package we developed allowed wide_character file names. Why should Ada
95 force non-English developers to use only English names?

> > Mike Feldman
> 
> 

-- 
Matthew H. O'Hara
Principal S/W Engineer
Lockheed Martin Tactical Defense Systems, Eagan, MN
612-456-3228               matthew.h.ohara@lmco.com