Re: Nontrivial examples of C interface with Ada

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <oGfX4.320$yf2.148802@news.pacbell.net>,
  tmoran@bix.com wrote:
> >any further abstracting of the binding to make it simpler is going to
> >inevitably loose some of the power of the original.  Sure, it will be
> >easier to use, but you won't be able to do as interface.
>   The escape hatch is to have routines that let you get at the lowest
> level entities and then make whatever system calls you want.

But for that escape hatch to be of any use, you need thin Ada bindings!

> >But then how do I set my sockets to non-blocking?
>   That's just a question of how thorough is the coverage of the thick
> binding.

Right. But this goes right back to the power issue. The more of the
power that was in the original that you put in your bindings, the more
it starts looking like the original interface.

> A lot can be done with a Text_IO style interface to blocking
> sockets, with asynchrony being provided by suitable Ada tasking.  In

Ugh! That's exactly the kind of heavy solution to a simple problem that
ticks off folks who are used to the easy solution. "Ada Ghetto"
syndrome. Why should I have to create a whole new task, plus God knows
what else to synchronize data between them, simply to do a non-blocking
I/O? Plus with some compilers, a blocking I/O blocks the entire Ada
program. If I were using C it would be a simple call.

--
T.E.D.

http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html


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