Re: Ada to Motif bindings

[Glen Cornell <the.cornells@home.com>]

Ted Dennison wrote:
> 
> I wouldn't say that. I've don a fair bit of Ada/Motif work. I'd say that
> in many ways Ada combined with UIL is a much better way to do GUI
> development than C or C++ with Motif.
> 

But you are just one of a few.  How many more at your facility are able
to write Motif code in Ada?  This is not rocket science, but you don't
see that many Ada people who are proficient in X.  Back in the old days,
calbacks were difficult to implement and were Ada-compiler dependent. 
Ada tasking on a Unix system was sometimes implemented with SIGALARM
instead of the current threads-based approach, which messed with the
workings of the early X toolkit.  Of course, there's the ever-present
problems of converting Ada types to and from c types.  For most X
programmers, this is too much hassle to write an X application in Ada.

As for using UIL, I too am a proponent of its use.  However, the amount
of Motif in Ada coding diminishes when you use Mrm. This is a good thing
for all of the reasons you pointed out.  For 98% of the user interfaces
out there, UIL does the job well.  But I'm talking about window
managers, widget sets, CAD packages or other lower-level Xlib
applications that require someone with a good deal of Xlib/Xt/Xm
experience to design and code well.  There just aren't that many
programmers out there.  Why?  Because the language doesn't fit the
Xlib/Xt/Xm model well.