From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,63585ba5c5be8595 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Glen Cornell Subject: Re: Ada to Motif bindings Date: 2000/04/06 Message-ID: <38EC2DC6.E17A407B@home.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 607369163 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <38E8E8CE.81EC851F@mitre.org> <38EAC651.1DD94F40@home.com> <8cffvp$q0s$1@nnrp1.deja.com> X-Accept-Language: en Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Complaints-To: abuse@home.net X-Trace: news1.rdc1.mi.home.com 954990730 24.0.52.22 (Wed, 05 Apr 2000 20:12:10 PDT) Organization: @Home Network MIME-Version: 1.0 NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 05 Apr 2000 20:12:10 PDT Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 2000-04-06T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: 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.