Re: Standard Library Interest?

["Stephane Richard" <stephane.richard@verizon.net>]

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> Except that this didn't answer my question: Is the APIWG seeing itself
> as being in the business of building a library or just endorsing package
> specs?
the do API's only.  He showed interest of data structures, components, but
it would be another group that would be taking care of it.  What he did say
is that which group it is (which I will find out) he believed that they
would
prove quite cooperative on the effort.

>
> All the stuff you mentioned about "Standards" is valid and I have no
> complaint. At best, I can read into it that the APIWG might put their
> Nihil Obstat on some library - if and when it had some "general
> acceptance". Which is to say, they are not in the business of building
> and maintaining a library and don't particularly want to be. That moves
> the library mission forward only by a tiny bit - if at all. It is as I
> suspected - the APIWG is not going to be the place to get this done.
>
Nope, I alerady replied him with the "Who is it then?" question hopefully
today I'll get a reply and we can find out.  from what I'm seeing it's one
of
7 possible groups:
- ARG - Ada Rapporteur Group
- ASISRG - Ada Semantics Interface Specification (ASIS) Rapporteur Group
- HRG - Annex H Rapporteur Group
- NRG - Numerics Rapporteur Group
- RRG - Real-Time Rapporteur Group
- SRG - SQL/Ada Rapporteur Group
- URG - Uniformity Rapporteur Group

I'm thinking ARG yes since they seem to deal with Ada in general and not be
limited to a single or group of Annexes.  URG?  I don't but perhaps they
would have valuable information as to how to "create the code" a style
guide, a minimal documentation template or something like that to help
assure a minimal quality of code in teh library.


> So this puts you back at square-one: *IF* you built a library and *IF*
> you could get the vendors to accept/distribute it and *IF* it met with
> general acceptance by the public, *THEN* you get a little gold star on
> your forehead by the APIWG. (At that point, I don't really need the
> APIWG, do I? Its a de facto standard. De facto: a matter of fact. De
> jure: a matter of law)
>
As for vendors, well I'll ask around and see what kind of answer I get.  If
they'd welcome them and so on and so forth.  Again provided, like you said
it is atleast a minimum quality code, with atleast a minimum clarity of
documentation (so any programmer can figure out what to do with it :-). and
if not in naming conventions also see how to integrate them (to a minimum
degree) with at least all related possible "parents" so to speak.  "I still
like my taxonomy chart (or hierarchy) approach to it all.  This way if there
were to be to packange of the same name, doing very different things perhaps
this way the could still be places on different branches of the hierarchy.
if not then perhaps the 2 authors can communicate and see how to fix the
naming conflict.  (that would be for existing code I assume).  we'd have a
lookup available so when creating New code they could know if it exists
somewhere etc etc...

> That's why I'm lobbying for the route that says "Get the vendors and
> possibly the ARG involved at the start." If the vendors were to say
> "Yeah, go ahead and build us something that looks kind of like this and
> we'll distribute it..." then you've got something working towards a de
> facto standard that the ARG and the APIWG and the People For The Ada Way
> and my great uncle George can all go put their little stamp of approval
> on it. Of course, if it got that far, I don't think we'd need anybody's
> approval. If it ships with every Ada compiler and its basically the same
> from one compiler to the next, its part of Ada.

Now if we can get your Uncle George stamp of approval, I call that a
success...;-).

Like I said the APIWG seemed to say that any group would welcome and be
willing to cooeperate.  My next phase is to see to what extent. :-)
>
> MDC
>
>


-- 
St�phane Richard
"Ada World" Webmaster
http://www.adaworld.com