Re: Ideas for Ada 200X (Ada.Sockets)

["Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <ve3wwg@cogeco.ca>]

Simon Wright wrote:
> "Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <ve3wwg@cogeco.ca> writes:
>>Ada streams and endian issues are also important. Write a program
>>that uses a socket between two endian different machines and the
>>endian issue becomes painfully important.  This also shows up
>>in the strangest places. My APQ PostgreSQL package lets you use
>>Ada streams to write blobs to the database. Well, guess what. If
>>you have machines of a different endian persuation trying to read
>>back those blobs written by a different endian persuation (with
>>Ada streams), then "they ain't right". Right now, I live with that
>>limitation because there is no elegant way to fix this.
> 
> The GLADE (GNAT Annex E support) contains an implementation of
> System.Stream_Attributes, in s-stratt.adb,  that magically makes streams
> endian-independent (uses XDR formatting).
> 
> You do need to use the gnatmake flag (-a ?) that says "recompile
> everything".

I know that the code is there as part of GLADE, and certainly if you
use GLADE, this works great. While most of my stuff is GNAT specific,
I prefer however to make it unecessarily so. The difficulty is, do I
make my packages insist on GLADE? If I do, I can immediately rule out
support for FreeBSD for example.

However, if you decide that GNAT only is good enough, then there is
still the issue of whether or not ACT will leave
"System.Stream_Attributes, in s-stratt.adb" alone. Or will it change?

Certainly there is a lot of flexibility when it comes to your own
personal pet project(s) that the world never sees. I see a larger
issue with code I want to publish however.

-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://home.cogeco.ca/~ve3wwg