Re: Distributed system portability

[Kilgallen@eisner.decus.org.nospam (Larry Kilgallen)]

In article <3B654382.B885CE20@canal-plus.fr>, Thierry Lelegard <thierry.lelegard@canal-plus.fr> writes:
>> Is it generally the case that a distributed system compiled on two
>> different architectures can talk to itself? In other words, if I write a
>> distributed system with GNAT, and I compile one portion on Windows and
>> another portion on Linux, are these two systems likely to talk to each
>> other? If not, are the stream formats likely to be compatible? If not,
>> is there a way to redefine the low-level stream operators for things
>> like Integer to ensure that the same format is used at both ends? Or do
>> I need to write translation routines to some architecture-independent
>> format?
> 
> In pratice, GNAT/GLADE seems to handle this (but I never used it).
> 
> In theory (although there is no other implementation of DSA than GLADE),
> there is absolutely no guarantee in the ARM about that. Interoperability
> is, in my opinion, the biggest hole in Ada95 and writing "open" software
> in Ada95 is much harder that it could have been if the default representation
> of streams were standardized.

When streams go to a file, wouldn't there be a problem with differences
between record-oriented file systems and bag-of-bytes oriented file
systems ?  While the distributed annex may be the topic of this
discussion, some may be more interested in making it possible
for their streams to be interpreted by other languages.

Or is the idea of streams that one should never try to access them
from a non-Ada language ?