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

[nickerson@pundit.ds.boeing.com ()]

In article <8cilej$bfc$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> writes:
|>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.

??? contaminate - that's provocative; in my area we usuallly chose
isolation of OS calls rather than purported "portable" things like
POSIX; historically for us that even included the ubiquitous C RTL;
this gives rise to a system that has but 1 malloc/calloc, 1 fopen,
1 strcpy, etc etc etc ...; this (arguable) philosophy gives a solid 
path to portablity;

|>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.

obviously agree on "minimize direct operating system" calls; am 
not familiar with GtkAda but believe it's not part of GNAT; does 
GtkAda support VMS and how long has it been around;

--bn (Bart Nickerson)
nickerson@pundit.ds.boeing.com
(206) 662-0183