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=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,2d2df3e9ad18fa63 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-06-23 10:02:02 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!wn14feed!worldnet.att.net!207.35.177.252!nf3.bellglobal.com!nf1.bellglobal.com!nf2.bellglobal.com!news20.bellglobal.com.POSTED!not-for-mail Message-ID: <3EF72EF7.6050400@cogeco.ca> From: "Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20030208 Netscape/7.02 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: ISO/IEC 14519 - Ada POSIX binding References: <87znkbqmby.fsf@deneb.enyo.de> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2003 12:46:47 -0400 NNTP-Posting-Host: 198.96.223.163 X-Complaints-To: abuse@sympatico.ca X-Trace: news20.bellglobal.com 1056386808 198.96.223.163 (Mon, 23 Jun 2003 12:46:48 EDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2003 12:46:48 EDT Organization: Bell Sympatico Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:39612 Date: 2003-06-23T12:46:47-04:00 List-Id: Mark Lorenzen wrote: > Florian Weimer writes: >>Mark Lorenzen writes: >> >>>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. >> >>There is no affordable documentation, for a start. POSIX.5 itself is >>rather expensive. There is no publicly accessible implementation. As >>a result, hardly anybody knows how the interface "feels" in practice. >> >>The rest of POSIX.5 has severe design deficiencies; I think it's >>reasonable to assume that binding to the BSD sockets API is not much >>better. > > (Sorry if this is sent twice) > > Personally I do not think that 44 CFH (approx. 33 USD) is expensive: > > http://www.iso.org/iso/en/CatalogueDetailPage.CatalogueDetail?CSNUMBER=34354&ICS1=35&ICS2=60&ICS3= Many feel that a standard should be freely available. In this case, I would agree. It certainly helps to gain better acceptance. > And we have a publicly available implementation called 'florist': > > http://libre.act-europe.fr/GNAT/ Ahem, FLORIST is : 1. only available to GNAT users 2. portable only to UNIX like systems so far 3. incomplete (no UNIX/Local socket support yet etc.) 4. and subject to platform differences (errno EAGAIN vs EWOULDBLOCK differences etc.) > You are correct that POSIX is not perfect, but it is PORTABLE and Not completely, without planning for the platforms that it is to compile on. I doubt that FLORIST guarantees uniform errno reporting, so you end up having to know which platform you are on (or in some simpler cases, planning for EAGAIN/EWOULDBLOCK as equally likely -- though not all situations are this simple). > supported by a lot of interesting platforms. If we want to persuade > people to using Ada instead of the "usual" languages for anything else > than real-time or embedded systems, then we NEED support for POSIX. I am not against POSIX support. I welcome FLORIST improvements (I use it actively). But to tie another Ada standard package to POSIX directly is unwise. > At the company where I work, we have just finished a proposal for a > system that initially must run on Solaris and must then later be > ported to Linux. What is the key here? POSIX! The system consists of > several UNIX processes and makes use of networking sockets, message > queues, real-time signals, memory mapping and memory locking (but not > shared memory). While POSIX may not be perfekt it is what is used in > the "real" world. Well, when you go to run that under Open/Net/FreeBSD, get ready to make some adjustments. There is a world of difference between Linux and FreeBSD on some of the APIs. ;-) -- Warren W. Gay VE3WWG http://home.cogeco.ca/~ve3wwg