From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,b37ee187e035b961 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Brian Rogoff Subject: Re: LZW Date: 1998/02/20 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 326989042 References: <6ca326$f0g$1@news4.isdnet.net> <34ea2f93.1444559@news.onramp.net> <6cga98$lmv$1@news3.isdnet.net> <34ED83B2.49176D99@cl.cam.ac.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Trace: 887995682 6995 bpr 206.184.139.132 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1998-02-20T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: 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: > >