Re: Annoying text window

[dennison@telepath.com]

In article <7jh2bh$u7p$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> In article <7jgq4e$r1o$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   dennison@telepath.com wrote:
> > And of couse its a copyright violation to use that library if
> > you don't have Visual C++ installed. :-(
>
> This is a false statement, there is no requirement for
> Visual C++ to be installed. In any case, always take
> responsibility yourself for making sure you have appropriate
> licenses, or ask your vendor to help you make sure!

Yikes! That's right. I misread Martin's "-mwindows" as "-lwindows".
Unfortunately that's a pretty thin excuse, as it just makes me triply
wrong:

  1)  "-mwindows" is a special gcc linker flag for just this purpose
(see
http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin/cygwin-ug-net/programming.html#GCC-G
UI for docs on it).

  2)  There's no such library as "libwindows.a" in gnat's win32
distribution anyway.

  3)  Even if there *were* such a library, there shouldn't be any
problem with just linking it in, as the Win32 libs were created from the
Microsoft DLL's using automated tools, which is really no different than
if they were read by some shrink-wrapped product I bought (eg: Sid
Meyer's Alpha Centauri). Microsoft may diagree on this point, though.
For instance, they might try to claim that this constitutes
"dissasembly", which the EULA prohibits.

The problem arises (I really hope I'm getting it right this time) when
you try to *compile* against the win32 bindings (Ada source code).
That's roughly because that code that was created using knowledge gained
directly from Microsoft souce code.

--
T.E.D.


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