Re: Ada 'hello world' for Android; success!

[Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>]

tmoran@acm.org writes:

>> I'd have thought it was more a problem of the bindings being thin?
>   The original Petzold "Programming Windows" book shows a "Hello, Windows!"
> program - it's two pages long.  Thick bindings like Claw, and "languages"
> like Python, and of course personal libraries, are what made it practical
> to code for Windows.

Ah, I remember those days :). That's why I started Windex. 

>> Making thick bindings to a moving target is quite a challenge, of course.
>   In successive versions of the Google Earth API, they changed one
> parameter of a function (GetPointOnTerrainFromScreenCoords) from a pointer
> to a safearray to a pointer to a terrain point.  That may be aesthetically
> nicer, but it breaks existing code.  I'm told that in one version of the
> Android OS angles are clockwise from North while in another version they
> are counterclockwise from East.  Google's software is not a very solid
> foundation on which to build a binding.

Or any app, apparently. This is scary!

Windex died in part because Microsoft kept changing the API, and I
didn't have the man-hours to keep up with them.
 
At least with jvm2ada and a strongly typed language on both sides, we
automatically learn of any API changes that are visible in the types.
That's a big step forward from the Windex days. Changes in behavior
are another problem.

-- 
-- Stephe