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Date: Wed, 02 Mar 2011 09:51:04 -0500
From: Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>
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Subject: Re: How do I write directly to a memory address?
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Date: 2011-03-02T09:51:04-05:00
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On 3/2/2011 4:19 AM, Pascal Obry wrote:
> Le 01/03/2011 23:08, Hyman Rosen a �crit :
>> What does that mean? Every program ultimately interfaces with its
>> environment and must do so in the correct way. When a program gets
>> this wrong then it has an error, and that is true even when the
>
> Exactly... So what? One single example: creating an interface to
 > spawn executable which must work on Windows and UNIXes. Have you do
> so? I've been there and this is overly complex, not because Ada but
 > because issues I have descibed (quoting, slash/backslash) and
> this because all this is *untyped* programming.

Actually, the error in this case is believing that there should
be such a single interface for both UNIX and Windows. It stems
from laziness. (I'll bet the UNIX version existed first, and then
got hammered on to try to make it work for Windows.) It's part of
the same parcel as leads Dewar to rail against college CS programs
which require students to write programs with GUIs.

Programmers, who are lazy by nature, will be very happy to blame
portability for failure to provide access to native features in
the way that other native applications do.

> When this is done it is just trivial and safe to use the interface.
 > That's the problem we are discussing with GNATcoll.

No, it's not. GNATcoll had a very plain and simple error - it added
quotes around a string that it should have left alone.