Re: PL/SQL -> Ada

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

On Mon, 27 Mar 2000, Marin D. Condic wrote:
> Bill Meahan wrote:
> > 
> > I think you miss my point: PL/SQL **is** Ada. Well, not really, but it
> > _is _cobbled from Ada83 (they left a lot of the good stuff out). Hence
> > an PL/SQL programmer _already_ knows a subset of Ada, probably without
> > ever realizing it. Oracle seems to have gone to great lengths to not
> > mention the derivation and only a handful of 3rd-party Oracle texts even
> > make a passing reference to PL/SQL's origins let alone expound on them.
> > 

... snip ...
> 
> > At the risk of being repetitious: It's not that Ada interfaces well with
> > SQL (in general), it's that thopusands of Oracle programmers are already
> > using what amounts to (a piece of) Ada83. So why no effort to expand on
> > that base?
> > 
> 
> Well, my question would be: How do you reach them? And what would you
> offer them with Ada? Could you find them on a newsgroup? If so, would
> offering them a compiler alone be sufficient benefit to them? Or would
> you have to offer them some bindings to something, development tools, or
> what? Just because they are using an Ada-ish language to work with a
> database does not necessarily imply that they have much use for a
> general purpose language outside of the database realm unless there is
> some utility or connection between the two. What might that be?

For better or worse, many programmers will migrate to tools which are
superficially similar to tools that they already know (witness Java).

I don't use relational databases a lot in my work, but let me offer a 
suggestion to Bill: take a look at some of the Ada bindings to existing 
DB interfaces (Postgres, ODBC, etc.) and see if these come close to
providing some of the functionality of PL/SQL. If so, you can use these 
to build some open source Ada DB tools that are familiar to PL/SQL
programmers, if not, you can hack away until you get something close. 

If you have questions about how to use Ada to build a PL/SQL like
interface on top of these bindings, this newsgroup would be an excellent
forum for them. In fact, why not take a look at the issue from the other
side too (educating Ada programmers about PL/SQL) and that way Ada
programmers will be better prepared to assist you.

-- Brian