system calls with Ada

system calls with Ada

[The Man on the Scene]

I'd like to hear some opinions on "portable" ways to make a system call 
from an Ada program.  My goal in doing this "portably" is that the software
should be buildable on Joe User's average Unix box -- I want it to be 
usable by the greatest number of people in the Internet community :)  That
is, those people who want to make use of a curses-based Ada-written 
public-domain spreadsheet package that's an ongoing student project for 
a software engineering course at California Polytechnic State Univ, San 
Luis Obispo. (whew!  take a breath after that sentence...)

Specifically, I'm working on taking this project, which has been developed
within the Apex Ada development environment, and porting it to the GNAT
compiler/set of libraries. (There are some differences in the pragmas that
each recognizes, and other than that porting hasn't been so bad, but that's 
not the main question here.)  The trouble I'm running into is that GNAT
doesn't include the same POSIX libraries that Apex does.  I've tried
compiling the florist 1.1 POSIX packages on a Solaris 2.4 box, using
GNAT 3.09, but I'm running into some problems there as well.  The other
alternative that I've seen is a collection called "posix.zip" that includes
a number of packages named with the prefix "OSI_".  There's one package
called OSI_Processes that compiled just fine, but I haven't tested it out
yet; the use is pretty straightforward as well, which is nice.

So, that's my situation.  Any comments?  I'd like to say thanks in 
advance...  judging from what I've been reading over the last month or so, 
c.l.a includes a number of skilled professionals who are often willing to 
take their time answering the ceaseless stream of questions from us 
students.  (And no, that wasn't there just to pull on the hearstrings of 
those skilled pros -- I really am grateful for the time that the 
professional Ada community invests here :)

-- 
O'Shaughnessy Evans
UNIX Systems Administrator, GST Call America; SLO, Ca / shaug@callamer.com
Computer Science Student, Cal Poly SLO / oevans@phoenix.calpoly.edu