Re: OS Bindings (was: Where is the elusive jump command?)

[Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>]

In article <2000Apr6.101035.1@eisner>,
  kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen) wrote:
> Certainly not, but I would expect vendors of any software
> product on an operating system would have to conform to
> expectations of those who use the operating system in order to
> have any success. In the case of compilers, this means
> bindings.

I certainly see why you might think this, coming from a DEC Ada
environment on VMS, where people have always been happy to
heavily contaminate (from a portability point of view) their
programs with starlet stuff.

But in our experience, most people want to *minimize* direct
operating system connections that tie their programs to a
particular operating system. For example, they would rather
use the Posix interface than make direct calls to unix service
routines, or use GtkAda rather than make direct calls to
Win32 services on NT.

I am not saying that all customers are in this mode (which is
why we for example ship a Win32 binding with the NT version
of GNAT, as well as lots of other OS bindings at various
levels), but it is definitely the most common mode of
operation among our customers.


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