Re: howto make system calls (newbie question)

["Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com>]

I think my point in bringing up the C Standard Library was not to suggest we
simply create some pragma imports for it and declare them part of the Ada
standard. I was thinking along the lines of "Here's some stuff that
programmers are used to having around. Shouldn't Ada provide some *similar*
features - done The Ada Way (tm)?"

Where we *might* want to produce a bunch of pragma imports is where there is
some reasonably common & standard library of stuff that could/should be
hooked to in a standard way. Even there, I'd prefer a slightly thicker
binding that had parameters passed The Ada Way and possibly generalized so
that it wasn't tied to some specific implementation. For example, it would
be possible to produce a standard package for connecting to sockets that
provided some minimal TCP/IP capability with child packages allowed for
anything that might be system dependent. Compilers are already doing this
kind of thing in many places but it would be handy to insure that the
specification was agreed-upon so that portability would be preserved.
(There's lots of GNAT.Something out there that is useful, but would it be
done the same way in Aonix.Something? At minimum, you'd want the package
names to line up!)

As for a time string, I have no problem with the notion of providing a
date/time string in a completely arbitrary and capricious manner and saying
"This is what you get if you use the standard routine for quick & dirty
display of time stuff." (Sort of a 'Image for time?) Obviously, the writing
of routines to produce every conceivable string/time representation still
remains possible and is left as an exercise for the student. At least the
programmer has *one* string formatted time available that might actually be
a fairly common time representation.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/

<tmoran@acm.org> wrote in message
news:gWBI6.38284$Jh5.35484299@news1.rdc1.sfba.home.com...
>   Perhaps this is a clue to the "why it hasn't been done question".
> Some of this is pointless for Ada, since we already have Ada.Calendar.
> And the formatting stuff, like asctime, seems to be a victim of the
> "curse of creativity" - everyone has their own idea of what should
> be done (see recent thread on date & time formatting routines).
>
>   The simple translation into a bunch of "pragma Import"s is not
> exactly exciting, and does not garner much money or fame for the
> person who does the grunt work.
>