Re: status of Ada STL?

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

I have no objection to adopting an existing library and declaring it to be
"The Ada Answer". The problem is that if all you have is "Somewhere out on
the net you can download this piece and that piece and some other piece...."
you don't really have an integrated answer that gives Ada some additional
leverage. How does someone write a textbook about Ada and show the student
how to do things with a library if there is no "Conventional" library to
rely on? How does an Ada programmer used to using library X start looking at
code written with library Y quickly understand and exploit it? If there were
only three libraries out there, it might not be so bad, but there are dozens
of them and you can't even count on one that comes with some specific
development environment - like MSVC++ comes with MFC. (Not "standard", but
at least a developer who used MSVC++ in one job will recognize what's going
on with it in another job.)

Unless some collection of stuff gets declared to be The Ada Answer in some
semi-official or conventional/customary way, someone with a more integrated
answer (such as C++ & STL or Java and all its class libraries) is always
going to have a hard-to-overcome competitive advantage. All the
protestations of "But you can download one of a dozen...." or "You can bind
to ...." or "You can go cobble together tools from these dozen...." won't
overcome the one-stop-shopping and integrated advantage of some competing
languages.

Like I said elsewhere - its the price of admission these days, not a
guarantee of success.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com


"Adrian Hoe" <mailbox@*nospam*adrianhoe.com> wrote in message
news:3d0f0c40_1@news.tm.net.my...
>
>
> There are a lot of (re)usable Ada code (or libraries) out there
> already. Most can be easily extended. The question here is it
> necessary to make a library? And we have many Ada websites. Why not
> have these libraries and download location listed there?
>