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NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2007 13:25:18 -0600
From: tmoran@acm.org
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: How come Ada isn't more popular?
References: <pan.2007.01.23.21.58.10.456317@linuxchip.demon.co.uk.uk.uk>
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Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2007 13:25:19 -0600
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Date: 2007-01-24T13:25:19-06:00
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> I think this is critical.  Why can't we just say:
>
> with stdio;
>
> pragma import (C, stdio, "stdio.h");
>
> and be able to get structs, functions, constants, variables from C in
> an obvious and reasonably reliable way?

  To some extent one can do this with APIs that come with typelibs.  But
having recently made an Ada binding to the Google Earth API, I observe
that the time spent finding out what the various calls *actually* do vs
what the documentation indicates they do, takes much more time than the
typing of a bunch of pragma imports etc.