Re: GUI was Re: why Ada is so unpopular ?

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

You won't get any argument from me. This was part of the point I was 
trying to make in the paper I sent to Ada Letters a while back. A *well 
integrated* library would be a really attractive thing to a developer. 
(This is why you don't want to simply glom onto some bag of stuff you 
harvested off the internet - its not *integrated*.)

Imagine something like this: Suppose Ada had a container library, a GUI 
library, an XML library and a statistics library all well integrated 
with each other. When the GUI needs a list of something - menus, etc. - 
it uses a list from the container library. When an XML document is 
sucked up into a tree, the tree is based on the container library. The 
statistics library might be defined as working on a dataset specified as 
an XML tree - again using the container library. Further, when the 
statistics library wants to display some output or store some resultant 
data it uses the GUI library and the XML library respectively. The GUI 
library could make use of XML as well for purposes of specifying the 
display or particular forms of output. (Dr. Leif's SVG example, for 
instance.)

Along comes some developer who needs to collect and process some kind of 
statistical data - lets say network analysis stuff. With Ada and its 
conventional library, he just needs to accumulate his data from 
somewhere, put it into an appropriate XML document and - BAM! - he's 99% 
done. The rest is just gluing together tools he automagically gets by 
virtue of using Ada and they all have a consistent, well integrated 
interface so its easy to learn and use.

Try doing *that* with some other language. ;-)

MDC


amado.alves wrote:> 
> Absolutely. This is a fascinating issue. I thought about it when I wrote here before, but kept silent. But now that you've touched it, I'll add a bit. A *lot* of Ada libraries, including already standard ones (e.g. ASIS) and upcoming standard (e.g. Directory_Operations), deal with a lot of data structures, and so they should be using the standard for that (Ada.Containers, also upcoming, AI-302). The result would be clearly a good thing, more cohesion both in the standard and in applications. This is motivation number 1 for Ada.Containers in my paper in Ada-Europe 2004 (about persistent containers, but touching the general issue in passing).


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Marin David Condic
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