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From: Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-dejanews.com>
Subject: Re: Linux Kernel in Ada. Repost
Date: 1999/04/11
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In article <7ep9p3$9fm@drn.newsguy.com>,
  mike@nospam wrote:
> There is no free Ada/Posix binding document.
> one must buy it
> Something like $60 or $100 I hear? Do you know of a free
> one we can download?

Probably not .. most standards cost money. The fact that
there is a free version of the Ada standard available
is very unusual (and took a big fight). Note that the
freely available version of the Ada standard is not quite
the same as the official standard, it contains paragraph
numbers, which are not allowed in ISO standards :-)

> Some calls are easy, but some that takes in a pointer to
> some complicated C structure, might not be, you need to
> map an Ada record to match the C struct correctly.

That's typically very straightforward using pragma
Convention, and pragma Unchecked_Union.
> There are zillion (well, many) other such C structs, and
> many constants defined in those C header files, used. All
> of these need to have Ada equivelent.

Which is why tools like c2ada are useful ...
>
> This is a waste of time for me having to do this
> everytime I encounter a new struct, and having each Ada
> programmer do the same becuase there is no common
> Ada/Posix binding to use that allready did all this
> work for us.

Well first of all, if you are talking about the IEEE
standard binding, there most certainly is a common
binding.

If you are talking about a comprehensive thin binding,
so far we have seen no demand for such a thing, which
is why it does not exist, at least in the GNAT world.
If someone wants to volunteer to create this, great!

What people want to do typically is to interface to
either rather standard stuff, some of which is available
for example in GNAT.OS_Lib, or Interfaces.C.Streams (the
former tend to be thick, the latter very thin), and some
of which they spin themselves as needed (a typical Ada
program does not make calls to huge numbers of C
routines).

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