Re: Is the Writing on the Wall for Ada?

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

Sorry. I misunderstood you to be suggesting it be put in the standard. 
With that:

Q: "who wants a std lib"
A: I do. And I lobby all the time in my workplace to implement things in 
Ada and have succeeded in some areas. I'd get more success if I had more 
to offer.

Q: "and what they want of one"
A: Just a short list off the top of my head:

1) Containers (probably on the way within the standard, but possibly we 
might find some things not covered...)

2) Math/Statistics - Vectors, Matrices, Big number math, Symbolic 
algebra, Stats functions on data sets (could be integrated with 
Containers *if* someone is smart enough to have containers of objects 
where the objects are defined as needing math operators. I did this in 
my personal library by defining classes called Ordinal and Scalar and 
variants of my containers that could only have something inherited from 
Ordinal or Scalar. You can then implement quite a bit of statistical 
stuff as functions on the container.) Any other specialty branches of 
Math that we see hanging around in popular Fortran or C (or even other 
Ada) libraries somewhere.

3) Related to Math: Encryption/Decryption, Compression/Decompression of 
streams.

4) Control Laws operations (a specialty for *my* specific field) Things 
like lead/lag filters, univariate/bivariate maps, rate and range limits, 
etc. This probably wouldn't appeal to huge masses of people, but it 
would sure make it easier for me to sell it locally - especially to my 
modelers where I have been having some success because our controls are 
built in Ada.

5) OS Interfacing - file systems, network communication, .ZIP files, 
various file formats (.wav, .mpg, etc), hardware (graphics cards, sound 
cards, communication ports, printers) etc.

6) Internet communication - FTP, e-mail, etc.

7) Database interface (maybe even a database itself?) - Some standard 
means of connecting to things like MySQL or Oracle - TBD what that means.

8) XML Document Object Model (one that uses tagged records, please.)

9) Desktop apps - The low-level, portable parts of various desktop apps 
- address book, calendar, spreadsheet, etc.

10) GUI interface - difficult to make portable, but possible.

And those are just a quick list of things I can think of without any 
real research. I don't think it would be a big job to start sifting 
through the various libraries that already exist in Ada to come up with 
a list of topics. You could also examine what things other popular 
libraries out there are providing (things that come with languages like 
Java and MSVC++ as well as "add-on" libraries people are peddling for 
use in more specialized problem domains.) There's two sources of info. 
Add in a little brainstorming and you'd likely have a list as long as 
your arm.

Once you've got a list, you just have to assign some relative level of 
importance to each item, sort them and get started with whatever pops up 
on top. (Probably containers and math, but we might see some surprising 
things if we conducted a poll) Ideas are the easy part. The hard part is 
getting some kind of official acceptance of the ideas and getting an 
implementation everyone can be reasonably happy with. (or at least 
equally miserable with.)

Dive in there and list a few of your favorite library branches. Maybe we 
can assign them Dewey Decimal numbers. :-)

MDC




chris wrote:
> 
> I wasn't saying we put it in the ARM, far from it!  As you point out 
> it's too long to wait between revisions.  The world changes much quicker 
> than that.  10 year revisions are ok for something like a language 
> standard.  I was simply asking who wants a std lib, and what they want 
> of one.
> 

-- 
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Marin David Condic
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