Collection Classes and such

Collection Classes and such

[Jeffrey L Straszheim]

Hi there,

I'm looking to put together some Ada projects, largely to familiarize
myself with the language. I've noticed many libraries available, but
I wonder which are well supported, commonly used, and the like.

What advice can folks give on:

* Collection classes
* Lexer and Parser generators
* Sockets and connectivity

-- Jeffrey Straszheim          
-- Systems Engineer, Programmer
-- http://www.shadow.net/~stimuli
-- stimuli AT shadow DOT net

Re: Collection Classes and such

[Ted Dennison]

Jeffrey L Straszheim wrote:

> I'm looking to put together some Ada projects, largely to familiarize
> myself with the language. I've noticed many libraries available, but
> I wonder which are well supported, commonly used, and the like.
>
> What advice can folks give on:
>
> * Collection classes

There are tons of them floating around. At work we use the Booch
components, which are being maintained, but have some holes which no-one
seems to be filling in. If you wanted to teach yourself to swim by
throwing yourself in the ocean, I could hardly think of a better way than
to take one of the missing parts of booch and implementing it. Just
figuring out how to instatiate one is a fair education in generics. %-{

> * Lexer and Parser generators

There are a few floating around. Most are lex/yacc clones. But I'd like
to direct your attention to OpenToken at
http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/OpenToken/OpenToken.html . It takes
the novel approach of using Ada's object-oriented features to build a
reusable object model of tokens. Most of the time all you have to do is
plug in the appropriate objects, and away you go. Extensions to the
object model are always welcome. It doesn't support parsing yet, but that
is being worked on. Also the maintainer is a startlingly intelligent and
good-looking fellow. ;-)


> * Sockets and connectivity

Again there are a few packages floating around. But I think some kind of
portable facility along these lines would be of great help to the
community. Making it compiler-portable would be fairly easy, but I
suspect making it OS-portable would be a bit of work.

For links to all this stuff, go to AdaPower ( http://www.adapower.com )

--
T.E.D.

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