Re: feedback asked on dab-decoder software in Ada

[Jacob Sparre Andersen <jacob@jacob-sparre.dk>]

Jan van Katwijk wrote:

> This summer I wanted to learn Ada (again, after a period of well over
> 20 years) and I made a reimplementation of the DAB software in Ada.

Sounds like an ambitious project.

> I would like to get some feedback on the use of the Ada language.

Some comments and questions:

+ It would make it easier to get contributions from other Ada
  developers, if you switched source style to something closer
  to what is suggested by the Ada Quality and Style Guide [1].

+ Why do you put the package specifications in a separate directory?

+ You might benefit from running your compiler with more warnings
  enabled.

+ A package body doesn't have to "with" itself.

+ There are no guarantees that "Integer" in Ada is the same as "int" in
  C.  If you need a C "int", you should use "Interfaces.C.int".

+ Are you sure you need as many access types as you declare?  (It looks
  - understandably - a bit like you are writing C in Ada.)

+ It looks like you aren't getting as much out of the type system as you
  could.  (A length should probably not be able to contain negative
  values. - Just to take a single example.)

> Any feedback and suggestions for improvement (it definitely runs
> slower than the C++ version) is welcome

I would suggest that you postpone the performance improvements a bit,
and focus on getting more out of Ada.

Greetings,

Jacob

[1] http://www.adaic.org/resources/add_content/docs/95style/html/cover.html
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