Re: ISO/IEC 14519 - Ada POSIX binding

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

I am not familiar with that standard, so I don't know about any specific 
problems. I would comment on some general problems:

You might have a variety of problems tying one standard to another. If 
the other standard you are referencing is changed, this creates problems 
for updating your standard. Are you forced to update your standard? Do 
you rely on an out-of-date standard for some potentially long span of 
time? Its not insurmountable, but it is an issue.

Also, this POSIX standard may be including a lot of things that might be 
difficult to support across a multitude of platforms. Ada was intended 
for machines ranging from bare-boards (no OS) up to full-size machines 
with lots of different OS's - some of which may not themselves be POSIX 
compliant. So you might have issues relating to the Least Common 
Denominator syndrome that standards have to deal with.

I don't know at what level this standard is written to, but it may 
likely be dealing with lots of lower level things in order to be 
applicable across a variety of implementations. If Ada had a sockets 
package, I'd like to see it abstract away as much as possible from the 
mechanisms used to move the bits. Is that philosophy incompatible with 
the standard you cite?

It is probably worth a look at the standard to determine its 
applicability, but I could imagine some reasons why it might not be the 
best answer.

MDC



Mark Lorenzen wrote:
> There has lately been some discussions on c.l.a about defining a
> socket package for use with Ada 200Y - either as a part of the
> standard or as a de-facto standard socket package.
> 
> So my big question is therefore: What's wrong with ISO/IEC 14519? It
> is of course pretty big, but that is a natural consequence of POSIX
> being big.
> 
> I think it would be better to require that vendors support the ISO/IEC
> 14519 instead of trying to define all sorts of packages that do not
> have the inter-operability and common data types that the ISO/IEC
> 14519 packages have.
> 
> What is your opinion?
> 
> - Mark


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Marin David Condic
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