Re: terminate applications

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

I'll grant you, it isn't as if it is a huge amount of work to import it 
from the standard C library. But that presumes you *have* the standard C 
library, doesn't it? It means you have to have C. If I have to keep 
resorting to C to get this or that capability, why not just do the job 
in C? Every time Ada says "Go call the C library..." it is telling the C 
programmers "You're right. You can't do the job in Ada. You have to use 
C." That's not very good advertising.

What's wrong with the nothion of having a "Standard Ada Library" that 
provides all these sorts of utilities? Why shouldn't it be done in a 
Standard Ada Way instead of a Standard C Way? Why shouldn't Ada aim at 
providing every capability you find in other languages - and then some - 
in order to be the One-Stop Shopping source for the developer?

As for the fact that C can modify a for loop variable and Ada can't, I 
find that not to be a compelling analogy. In Ada, if I needed that 
feature, I'd declare another variable and keep incrementing that counter 
& modify it as I needed to. The facility exists *entirely within Ada* 
and doesn't require that I embed some non-standard, external operation 
into my code that may or may not work if I want to take it to another 
environment.

If Ada had *everything* that C had (like an operating system, a 
database, a GUI, a network, etc.,) then people might find it a more 
attractive environment in which to program. Since we can't get there all 
in one giant leap, I think we at least ought to start with the things 
that *are* achievable in some reasonable span of time - like getting a 
"HALT" subprogram (and other related OS connections) into some sort of 
standard library.

MDC



Samuel Tardieu wrote:
> 
> I don't get your point: importing exit() from the standard C library
> is not more difficult than instantiating Ada.Unchecked_Dellocation to
> reclaim unused memory space. If the programmer really needs this
> feature badly, it only takes a few characters to use it.
> 
> C, and many other languages, do have the ability of modifying a loop
> index within the loop. We do not have this in the Ada "for" loop", but we
> can "emulate" this with a varianle and a simple or a "while" loop. The
> situation is similar here. If you want to do it, you can, but there is
> no need to make it a language construct or a standard library.
> 
>   Sam


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Marin David Condic
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