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From: n_brunot@my-deja.com
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Do we need "Mission-Critical" software? Was: What to Do?
Date: Fri, 05 Jan 2001 09:15:16 GMT
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In article <932mi6$r2k$1@trog.dera.gov.uk>,
  "Kevin Rigotti" <rigotti@atc.dera.gov.uk> wrote:
> Bindings and support for Gtk are a good thing, but at the end of the day
> what I and others in a similar situation really want to do is to build the
> clever stuff in Ada then hand it over for integration with someone elses
> GUI, produced using whatever is cheapest and easiest.

I agree.
I recently looked at some Gtk sources to see how Win32 fonts were
implemented.
(This is not a criticism of Gtk, which is an excellent library)
I noticed the same thing in a lot of C libraries interfaced in Ada.
And we often had to do it in our code.

A very huge part of those packages is simply writing specifications, and
pragma import ...
Which requires some work in Ada, while you would have absolutely nothing
to do in C.
This is of very high cost.

Ada83 made the enormous mistake to lack a pragma export, denying the
importance and justification of others languages.
May be one of the biggest problem of Ada95, is the work required to
interface a simple C library.
This should be made much more automatic by the language or by
appropriate tools.
This is not the case today.
Take a C library, write a simple program to test it in Ada, and the same
in C.
It's the better way to understand what should be done to see Ada more
widely used.










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