Re: Ada95 Streams Question

[pautet@email.enst.fr (Laurent Pautet)]

<michael@ifr.luftfahrt.uni-stuttgart.de> wrote:

| If you just look at the wording of this annex the big picture is a
| huge monolithic program that is now broken into pieces (partitions)
| and executed as a whole on a homogenous network of computers.

This wording is the *spirit* of the annex. And not a
restriction. Everything is there to do whatever you want. Especially
multiprogramming in an heterogenous network.

| That is definitely not what I understand by distributed computing.
| Although this could certainly be interpreted in a more open way, this
| is exactly what is currently implemented for GNAT.

GNAT implements what has been defined in the LRM in order to
validate. The annex has been implemented in order to work in the
context you mentionned above. But it is also working in other
situations. "monolithic application + homogenous network" is a
minimum, but nothing prevents GNAT distributed annex from having a
design that allows you to develop a "multiprogram application + an
heterogenous network". There are already examples of multiprograms
communicating by using distributed objects. Moreover, nothing prevents
GNAT from adding new features as long as the default behaviour follows
the LRM.

| This is not meant as a criticism of the GNAT team. They do a marvelous
| job and just implemented what the standard suggests. I just want the
| Ada community to reconsider the real "openness" of Ada with respect to
| heterogeneous computer environments and client server computing.

I agree that some implementation restrictions are too strong if we
consider what is outside the Ada community and we can argue on
them. Once again, the default compilor behaviour has to follow these
restrictions, but nothing prevents a compilor vendor to bypass these
implementation restrictions in a second step.
-- 
-- Laurent