Re: Ada & Posix

[Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk>]

Jerry van Dijk wrote:
> It would be great if we would have Posix bindings on
> the major platforms with all compilers, as that would
> remove a lot of environment dependenties in our code.

Fully agreed! Adding a good POSIX.5 binding with man pages
to the GNAT distribution should help a lot to make Ada an
attractive system programming language for Unix systems.

> 1) Anyone willing to do such a binding will first have
>     to spend money on buying a standard;

Expensive paper-only standards are a real hazzle for non-commercial
(academic) users. Suggesting your local university library to get
a copy is probably the best approach.

> So, I am not suprised that -AFAIK- no Ada vendors
> are rushing to get the standard implemented.

And as a consequence, not much portable system programming for
Unix in Ada seems to be going on at the moment and GNAT seems to
be mostly used for teaching the language since C development
environments still provide a much richer API at the moment
and every Ada developer has to first come up with his private
subet binding to the C libraries before he can start with the
actual project.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Security Group, Computer Lab, Cambridge University, UK
email: mkuhn at acm.org,  home page: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>