Re: Nontrivial examples of C interface with Ada

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

tmoran@bix.com wrote:
>   I would agree that including a Simplex LP solver along with elementary
> matrix operations would be a confusing mix of conceptual levels.  But
> Windows is already conceptualized at a fairly high level.  For instance,
> there's a call to ask the user the name of a file, and then open it.  The
> user may browse around, the request may look at files with only certain
> extensions, etc.  If that's a single call, then I feel there should be a
> single call to open a socket.  Windows itself presents a highly variable
> level of abstraction, and smoothing that seems to me a legitimate and
> useful function of a thick binding.  Heck, for some purposes a *really*
> thick platform independent binding is desirable and that's certainly
> pretty far from "just the interface to some existing body of software".
> It presents an interface that lets the programmer easily do things that
> would have been hard with a really thin binding.

I'm not sure you were getting my point. It was simply this: When do you
stop calling it a "binding" and start calling it a "subsystem" or
"application" or something else? CLAW, IMHO, is not a "binding" - it is
not a simple, one-to-one connection to underlying OS calls. It provides
its own design and implementation decisions about what a windowing
environment should be and, while this may parallel Windows concepts to a
large degree, it provides significant functionality in its own right.
Hence, it is not a "binding". (If a binding gets thick enough, it stops
being a binding?)

Win32ada *is* a binding because it makes no attempt whatsoever to extend
or limit the capabilities of the Win32api. If all I do is juggle the
parameters around a little bit so that there is still a one-for-one
mapping between my code and the Win32api, but my code provides types,
etc., which are of an Ada flavor, I'd still think it was a "binding" -
albeit, now a "thick" binding.

If someone used such a thick binding to build an application or
subsystem (such as CLAW) *that* would be the time to try to present to
the programmer a truly Ada-ish design. Its just that at that point, its
no longer a "binding", is it?

MDC
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Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
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