Re: ISO/IEC 14519 - Ada POSIX binding

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

tmoran@acm.org wrote:
>>But there _are_ problems WRT Ada. The first that comes to mind is
>>the whole error handling approach. POSIX likes the idea of an errno
>>value with errno codes. The Ada approach often uses exceptions, and
> 
>   I have the paper version of IEEE 1003.5-1992 which specifically has a
> discussion of why that Ada binding to POSIX uses exception handling
> instead of errno.  ISO/IEC 14519 appears to be a successor, covering more
> ground (eg sockets).  The Ada binding is thick in the sense of using
> exceptions, strong typing, generics, tasking, etc, but it's still pretty
> "close to the hardware".  It also was designed pre-Ada95.  In designing
> CLAW, we studied the 1003.5-1992 book, but in many cases went for a higher
> abstraction level.  For instance, claw sockets need merely Open, Write,
> Close (Close is optional, actually, thanks to Finalization) with lots of
> stuff, like the multiple states a socket can be in, happening "under the
> hood".  There are projects that need the detailed level of control, and
> there are projects that will be implemented faster with the simplified
> interface.  I don't think a one-size-fits-all standard socket binding
> would be adequate.

The point of a standardized package is not necessarily to have
"one-size-fits-all", though that might be one goal, if it were
possible. Ada.Text_IO is certainly not "one-size-fits-all" for
text I/O, but yet, it works sufficiently well for a large majority
of the cases required for applications.  I think many people would
be happy to achieve something similar for network programming.

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