Re: PL/SQL -> Ada

["Marin D. Condic" <mcondic-nospam@quadruscorp.com>]

Foo Bar wrote:
> Given the oodles of PL/SQL programmers out there who are already
> familiar with many of the basic concepts of Ada (count me as one of
> them), why no documentation or tutorials or roadmaps aimed at helping
> the PL/SQL programmer "graduate" to Ada? Heck, it'd be nice to see a
> paper or two on taking your PL/SQL programs and running them outside of
> Oracle via Ada, perhaps working against another brand of database (DB2,
> Sybase etc.). And seeing that the Postgres folks have their own
> PL/Postgres which is obviously a sort-of clone of PL/SQL and gaining in
> popularity, the base is expanding further.
> 
At one time in the not too distant past, I spent a great deal of time
programming in Ada, connecting to SQL for access to the Rdb database.
DEC had an SQL pre-processor for Ada that made this pretty painless. (As
you know, this is now owned by Oracle and is being migrated - if not
already - to match the Oracle product.) Ada always mixed well with SQL
IMHO mostly because it has such rich data representation capabilities.
Naturally, I like the programming structures of Ada and accessing a
database from it is an added bonus.

I suppose that the reason such tutorials/papers are not available is
because it takes someone with A) experience in both languages, b) time
and skills to write such material, c) a desire to advocate Ada to "the
masses" and d) contacts within the PL/SQL community to spread the word.
Kind of makes it hard to find someone to sign up for the job, eh? :-) 

I would imagine that if you were to write a sort of
"Pascal-Subset-Intro-To-Ada-For-PL/SQL-Programmers" paper, we could find
an appropriate website to put it on. Adapower comes to mind for that
task. Then you'd need to talk it up to the PL/SQL newsgroups. I'm also
sure that you could find help here in the way of answering specific
questions, ("I can do this in PL/SQL - How does it work in Ada?") and
probably find a few distinguished reviewers who would look it over and
make suggestions. If you think it is important, maybe you are the best
qualified to do the job.

MDC
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