Re: Ada 'hello world' for Android; success! (but music player failure)

[Georg Bauhaus <rm.dash-bauhaus@futureapps.de>]

On 30.11.11 04:33, Stephen Leake wrote:

>> Alternatively, get good hardware and have SofCheck's Ada compiler---which
>> outputs good C---connect your program to the Objective-C world. ;-)
> 
> I don't see why introducing yet another language would help things.

Introducing one single language besides Ada will work,
which helps things a bit, in comparison.

The idea is to write the "logic" part of the programs not in
[Objective-]C, but in Ada, when it is considered superior to C.
Then, use the Cocoa framework (or GNUStep) for I/O, including GUI,
and use Objective-C.

Apple asks us to write in "plain C" the parts of our programs that
require the highest efficiency. With a seamless Ada->C compiler,
I can instead write these parts in plain Ada, or SPARK.
Since the Ada standard essentially guarantees that interfacing
to and from C works well, any additional work when writing
logic parts in Ada will be the writing of pragma Export and calling
Ada operations from view controllers, for example.

Where Ada has something to offer, such as a more expressive type system,
or source text that would typically input more information to code
analysis, these advantages will stay, and still I can play by the
rules, using GCC or Clang/LLVM as terminal compilers.


(The current state of portable GUI programming results first and foremost
from the way we let a handful of companies/organizations create mutually
incompatible, yet conceptually compatible, GUI programming
environments, again and again. We pay them, or support them in other ways ...
Sadly, the least promising solution today is wishing to pick
a language such as Ada for writing GUI applications. The choice of Ada
always results is some layered approach, lacking integration.
Be it GTK+, AWT etc, Tk, WPF/.NET, Qt, ...  If industry does not
wish to change this state, then a separation of concerns can still
lead to something reasonably productive, and stadard:
the separation of logic (written in Ada) and GUI (written
in software corporation's choice).)