Re: Assuaging sour grapes :-) [was: newbie Q: storage management]

[clines@delete_this.airmail.net (Kevin Cline)]

"John G. Volan" <johnvolan@sprintmail.com> wrote:

>Michael F Brenner wrote:
>
>> Another reason to open up the group to more people is that this group feels
>> that certain problems have been solved, according to recent posts.
>
>I said the problems you described _might_ have been solved, but without
>something more than the sketchy description you gave, it's hard to tell.
>
>> However,
>> some people in the community do not have access to the reasons why they
>> think they have been solved. In recent posts, I have been told that there
>> are machine- and compiler-independent ways within Ada-95 to
>>    - put bits into a byte
>>    - do stream_IO
>>    - select alternate bodies for packages
>>      (for example, 1000 device drivers with the same visible part,
>>      of which one is selected as part of a computer program)
>
>I asked you to show a fleshed-out example of this this last problem so I
>or others could perhaps help you, but so far I haven't seen it.  But let
>me take a guess at it any way:
>
>    --------------------------------------------------------------------
>    package Drivers is

I think you missed the point, which is to dynamically load a package body at
run-time, not build one enormous executable containing all 1000 device
drivers.  On most systems, dynamically loaded libraries can be built from C or
C++ code.  The library source code is portable, although the commands to build
the library from source vary from system to system.