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-Thread: 103376,d17f9c8d910b90f6 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 11:14:10 +0800 From: Adrian Hoe User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031013 Thunderbird/0.3 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Microsoft & Ada References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit NNTP-Posting-Host: 219.95.193.141 X-Original-NNTP-Posting-Host: 219.95.193.141 Message-ID: <41450f55_1@news.tm.net.my> X-Trace: news.tm.net.my 1095044949 219.95.193.141 (13 Sep 2004 11:09:09 +0800) Organization: TMnet Malaysia Path: g2news1.google.com!news1.google.com!news.glorb.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!newsfeed.cwix.com!news1.tm.net.my!not-for-mail Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:3650 Date: 2004-09-13T11:14:10+08:00 List-Id: Wes Groleau wrote: > Brian May wrote: > >> What if, say Microsoft were to design and implement thick Win32 >> bindings for functions that are not standardized in Ada? Some >> examples: Win32 GUI or serial IO. >> >> Would this be considered a good thing or bad thing? > > > Probably good, unless it was an attempt (and a successful > one) to eliminate open source bindings and therefore > other products using open source bindings. > >> What if there were able to implement the bindings in such a way that >> they don't have to supply any source code? What if the bindings can >> only be used with Microsoft's compiler? (I guess it may still be > > > Even if Microsoft's compiler is fully validated (and I wouldn't > take _their_ word for it for a second), it could still contain > extensions (for example, GNAT has 'Img) that no other compiler > has--and as soon as another copies it, M$ will change it. > > Then their bindings could be written to use such extensions.... > >> I think there are a number of related issues here, so I am curious >> what peoples thoughts are on the matter. > > > My thoughts are that no matter how good a Microsoft > product is or seems to be, their history shows that > they nearly always include some kill-the-competition > feature. And rarely include enough reliability > features. > I strongly agree to last statement. -- Adrian Hoe m a i l b o x AT a d r i a n h o e . c o m