From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,1479b753518e2325 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: kna@nospam.com Subject: Re: how to make Ada more popular? Date: 1999/01/27 Message-ID: <78nc8k$h88@drn.newsguy.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 437575009 References: <787hk5$q6t@drn.newsguy.com> <789kei$mbd$1@news.Kijfhoek.NL.net> <78hoiq$q5b$1@remarQ.com> <78jb14$s6g@dfw-ixnews5.ix.netcom.com> Organization: Newsguy News Service [http://www.newsguy.com] Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1999-01-27T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: One way to make it easier to develop applications in GNAT would be to bundle with the distrubtion as many bindings as possible. The main problem I see now with using Ada/Gnat for real world commerical application is lack of bindings to external systems. Looking at adahome binding page, shows me some links to bindings which some of them seem old (one even was last updated 3 years ago, and still talks about NT 3.5 as the current windows NT system!) , some are supported on limited platforms only, and require too much work to install, configure, build on the current platform, and one gets the feeling they are downloading something they have no idea in what state it is in and who is supporting it and if there is something more recent than it somewhere else. compare this situation with Java for example, where one can go to one site (Sun javasoft) and download the JDK, which is big and contains many packages needed to do almost anything. or go to IBM alphaworks(?) site and download tons of Java packages for free. In C/C++ offcourse, one needs no such bindings becuase the most of the world out there seem to be writen in C, and so interfacing to it from C/C++ applications is no issue and the C/C++ libraries and header files come with the OS as a default. I read somewhere that some folks are planning to package into an RPM package GNAT with GLADE and some other packages that does not now come with GNAT proper now. This is great news, and this is the sort of thing needed more to help Ada become more used. The main bindings I see needed to be packaged are: binding to Unix system services (so one can do system programming in Ada), TPC/IP binding, Motif, ODBC, Win32 binding, GLADE, etc.. without such packages readily avaliable in one self contained system, that one can depend on being there and updated with each release, Ada will remain a nice well defined langauge, and nice compilers, but very little used in real world commerical applications. Kna