Re: Hash table

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic.brenta@tiscali.be>]

David Trudgett <wpower@zeta.org.au.nospamplease> writes:
> I'm looking for a Free Software Ada95 container library, or in
> particular, a hash table (or associative list).
>
> I noticed that Ada 2005 may include a standard Ada.Containers library,
> but is there a working prototype of this available now?

Ada.Containers has not been finalised yet; what is known at this time
is that they require an Ada 200y compiler and thus will not work with
GNAT 3.15p.  If you feel like experimenting with bleeding-edge stuff,
off the top of my head I can think of four places where you can get
different versions of Ada.Containers:

- The home page on Tigris for both Charles and Ada.Containers[1]
- gnat-3.4 (in Debian sarge aka stable)
- gnat-4.0 (in Debian etch aka testing)
- and a port of Ada.Containers to Ada 95 by Martin Dowie[2].

But I recommend neither of them for now; see below.

> A bit of searching found the ASL (Ada Structured Library --
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/adasl), which hasn't had a new release
> since 2001 (which means it must be perfect ;-)). Should I use ASL, and
> if I do, will it be completely different from the proposed
> Ada.Containers standard?

Yes, ASL will be completely different from Ada.Containers.

> I'm using Gnat (3.15p) on Debian Linux.

You are in luck, as are all Debian users who program in Ada :)

apt-get install libcharles0-dev

will install Charles, the precursor container library to
Ada.Containers (in fact, Matt Heaney submitted Charles as his proposal
for the standard containers).  Its interface is similar to that of
Ada.Containers.  I recommend you use that for the time being.

HTH

[1] http://charles.tigris.org
[2] http://www.martin.dowie.btinternet.co.uk/

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.