Re: Call for ACE participation

[mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)]

In article <dewar.845433836@merv>, Robert Dewar <dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu> wrote:

>Thick bindings have to be built on top of thin bindings in any case.
>For many purposes thin bindings are far preferable to thick bindings.

One advantage of thin bindings is that programmers experienced with
the original library will see familiar stuff on the Ada side. I
discovered this originally when I first got the Meridian Ada 83
compiler for Win 3.1. I found I could use Petzold's book immediately,
because the library structures, types, and operations were easy
to translate mentally into Ada. (And I was a real novice at writing
Windows apps, so having a good text really helped).

I rediscovered this over the summer, in writing some Mac apps to
provide examples and explore the GNAT MacOS binding. I could go
straight to a couple of books I had, and also to Inside Mac, to find
the explanations I needed.

>Ultimately we perhaps need both, but reliastically, we will have only
>thin bindings for many applications.

Once again it's a question of market demand. Who will write the thick ones
(and the competent documentation and tutorials to go with them)?

Mike Feldman