Re: Nontrivial examples of C interface with Ada

[tmoran@bix.com]

>Ultimately, I'd build that sort of stuff on top of the binding. What I
>think constitutes a "binding" is just the interface to some existing
>body of software. Yeah, it will look C-ish, but that's what it is. From
>there, you have to define your own environment to do things with a true
>Ada flavor.
  I would agree that including a Simplex LP solver along with elementary
matrix operations would be a confusing mix of conceptual levels.  But
Windows is already conceptualized at a fairly high level.  For instance,
there's a call to ask the user the name of a file, and then open it.  The
user may browse around, the request may look at files with only certain
extensions, etc.  If that's a single call, then I feel there should be a
single call to open a socket.  Windows itself presents a highly variable
level of abstraction, and smoothing that seems to me a legitimate and
useful function of a thick binding.  Heck, for some purposes a *really*
thick platform independent binding is desirable and that's certainly
pretty far from "just the interface to some existing body of software".
It presents an interface that lets the programmer easily do things that
would have been hard with a really thin binding.