Re: Ada's (in)visibility

[emery@mitre-bedford.arpa (David Emery)]

>To be fair Xlib is not suitable to mulitasking and most large Ada systems use
>tasking.  There is no good solution to this problem yet.  

There is a very good solution to this.  Don't use tasks.  Write
sequential Ada.  This provides EXACTLY the same kind of program you
would get if you wrote the application in C.  Just because Ada has
tasking, there is no obligation to use it in any specific application.
I'm always bothered by people who use lack of support for Ada's
advanced featuers to write a program in C that can be done in
equivalent Ada (without tasking, for instance).

An true Ada binding to Xlib should handle the tasking issue (perhaps
by abstracting a kludge).  This is one of the things that makes doing
good Ada bindings non-trivial.  If someone tries to sell a "binding"
to Xlib that does not handle tasks, he's not selling a binding.
Instead, he's selling PRAGMA INTERFACE(C), without doing any of the
real work.  

The real solution for Ada and X Windows will occur when X Windows is
multi-threaded in a way that meshes with Ada tasks.  

				dave