Re: Textedit and txt

[brbarkstrom@gmail.com]

> ...
> > I don't agree with
> > the notion of creating a "deprecated" category of items.
> 
> Ada has had such a category since Ada 95. See Annex J. So we'd hardly be 
> creating it, just adding to it.
> 
> I'm not much interested in that; I'd just make a new set of stuff that lives 
> alongside the old stuff (I don't see any practical way to get rid of type 
> String itself). I'd love to take all of the Wide_Wide_ stuff and toss it 
> into the garbage, as no one would ever use that if they had any reasonable 
> choice (wastes too much space and time).
> 
> The problem is that we're supposed to add Wide_Wide_ support to everything 
> that doesn't have it already, and if we do that, everything turns to 
> madness. (Do you want to have Wide_Wide_Open in all of the I/O libraries? I 
> sure as heck don't.) So the question isn't whether we add a large lump of 
> new stuff (that's a given), the question is whether we try to do it sanely 
> or just give up and add another thousand things no one will ever use. (The 
> Wide_Wide_ stuff is already in that category.)
> 
>                                                  Randy.

Sounds sensible.

I'll note for general interest that the new Comm. of the ACM has an
article on a legal case that may come up before the Supreme Court with
an argument between Oracle and Google about whether API's can be copyrighted.
Oracle has argued that the API's that give rise to the Java libraries can
be copyrighted; Google argues that they can't [see Sprigman, C. J., 2015:
Oracle v. Google: A High-Stakes Legal Fight for the Software Industry,
CACM, 58, No. 5, 27-29].  The article points out that one of the advantages
of Java (at present) is that developers can become familiar with the libraries
of methods and quickly apply them when they want to write a new application.
If Oracle wins, Oracle will probably want to make the libraries proprietary
and license them.  I suspect that the Ada libraries, particularly those that
are part of the gcc releases, may be less prone to that kind of problem.
However, the case bears watching.

Bruce B.