Re: LZW

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com>]

On Fri, 20 Feb 1998, Markus Kuhn wrote:
... snip...
> A reasonable mandate that you have to write your own new code in
> Ada95 should never ban you from including existing C libraries. Note
> that GNAT uses libc in the runtime library and that there exist
> many useful C libraries out there (for JPEG compression,
> LZW compression, bignum arithmetic, encryption, etc.) that
> contain highly optimized assembler parts for quite some
> architectures, etc. Given the excellent C interfacing capabilities
> that Ada has, it would be a tremendous waste to reimplement these
> just tohave them in Ada to fullfil some braindamaged pure-Ada
> requirement.

Well put Markus! This should probably be an FAQ. The C interfaces are IMO 
the most important new feature of Ada 95 (new as in "not in Ada 83"), and
there are now very few good reasons to recode working C into Ada. 

-- Brian

> Use Ada intelligently to get your project done quickly and do
> not waste time to fulfill a silly mandatory buerocratic
> doctrine by recoding existing highly optimized C code into
> Ada.
> 
> It would be useful to write Ada95 wrappers for many of the
> popular C libraries available from the GNU project and others.
> 
> Markus
> 
> -- 
> Markus G. Kuhn, Security Group, Computer Lab, Cambridge University, UK
> email: mkuhn at acm.org,  home page: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
> 
>