Re: Air traffic control system in Java

[Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>]

On 3/4/2011 8:08 PM, Randy Brukardt wrote:
> If Ada had had a built-in GUI, it surely wouldn't have been designed for
> IPads and the like. Touch interfaces are quite different than Windows/Mac
> (Xerox really) interfaces. Are you really sure that this would be a help?
>
> Java is on their third or fourth GUI design. Their approach is to just throw
> them away.
>
> That of course is available in Ada; if anything, the problem is that there
> are too many GUIs (GTKAda, GWindows, Claw, and on and on...) which prevents
> any of them from being all that standard.
>
> And the work to define a standard GUI to the level required for the Ada
> standard would be immense, especially in order to prevent tying it to any
> underlying target. (We'd want it to work on both Windows and Linux for
> instance, without requiring either of them.) And I don't see anyone really
> stepping up to do that work.

Having a GUI as part of the language standard would be bad for exactly
the reasons you describe. (C++ has no such thing either.) But what you
do need is first class Ada support for the GUI features of important
environments. When people are programming the iPad's multitouch screen,
they ought to be able to do that with a proper Ada API, and not have to
generate their own version by hacking one from a different language.
And it's up to Ada proponents to provide such a thing, because as things
are now, no one else will.