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From: "Tarjei Jensen" <tarjei.jensen@kvaerner.com>
Subject: Re: GNAT, LINUX, KDE
Date: 1999/11/26
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Date: 1999-11-26T00:00:00+00:00
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Vladimir Olensky wrote:
>    I think that it would be better if something like this would be done
>in pure Ada. I know this is not simple.  Doug Schmidt spent many
>years for all that.  But he looked into the future and his guess
>was right.
>
>  If similar communication subsystem would be a part of a standard
>or semi-standard Ada environment  it could provide an excellent
>platform  for many great things and make Ada more competitive
>in some areas where C++ has better positions.


You're not the only one who think along those lines.

I'm working on a Ada binding to the socket API. Progress is very slow since I
only do this in my less than copious spare time.

The reason that I want my own binding, is that I want something that "works
with" Ada, not just something that Ada tolerates. I want the compiler to catch
as many as possible of my mistakes.

I have discovered that is Ada vendors that supported interface.c were required
to supply basic datatypes like size_t, time_t for the C libraries, then life
would be easier.


>Importance of communications increases every year.


True.

I think network programming is a field where Ada could do really well if the
right examples existed and this theme were used by educators.

This is one reason why it is vital to get a good, portable and freely usable
socket interface for Ada.

After that we can begin building service libraries for such tings as ftp,
telnet, http, etc.

I believe that network programming (with the right library) could be the ideal
theme for teaching programming. I believe that students will get a sense of
achievement  when their program works. E.g. getting their program to retrieve
the time of day from a server and displaying it. Since the theme is very
practical it should help motivating the students. And it would be easy to vary
the difficulty according to the students level of competence.

Since I am not an educator and have no teaching experience I could be entirely
wrong about this. It would not surprise me at all if I was completely wrong.


Greetings,