From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Path: border1.nntp.dca3.giganews.com!border3.nntp.dca.giganews.com!Xl.tags.giganews.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!local2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!news.giganews.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 04 Sep 2013 06:22:40 -0500 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2013 07:22:38 -0400 From: "Peter C. Chapin" X-X-Sender: peter@whirlwind Subject: Re: How (or Where?) to get started on Ada? (Properly) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: References: <9ec51e40-081f-4ec7-b17f-7c73dbdcd10a@googlegroups.com> <52270a8c$0$6583$9b4e6d93@newsspool3.arcor-online.net> User-Agent: Alpine 2.02 (DEB 1266 2009-07-14) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com X-Trace: sv3-AjfisTVk6nvKXBbNkyc1TOv99kP6OV9r1fRenhlCjoRT+MlET6oR5h1TjGqbdAaB/nTCINF6w8wfU8B!gwOM2donR1gISymZvXAIN/PyE+TOeuy4+xMzXLSNlgtsE0Wco85H7BMkOBNFig2aPY7xHgRp6w== X-Complaints-To: abuse@giganews.com X-DMCA-Notifications: http://www.giganews.com/info/dmca.html X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 X-Original-Bytes: 3892 Xref: number.nntp.dca.giganews.com comp.lang.ada:183282 Date: 2013-09-04T07:22:38-04:00 List-Id: On Wed, 4 Sep 2013, e.s.harney@gmail.com wrote: > Thank you for your replies and the links! So Ada95 books/resources are > still a good place to get started for learning the language today then? Yes, Ada95 materials are still relevant. They don't cover the new features of Ada2005 or Ada2012, of course, but with only a few little exceptions everything they do say is still true. Furthermore, Ada95 is still regarded by many as a perfectly reasonable language to use. ("I don't need no stink'n synchronized interfaces or executable contracts!") One nice thing about Ada is that it has enjoyed an unusually (my opinion) high degree of coherence during its evolution. I send kudos to those who have labored to make that so. This isn't to say that it doesn't have warts and quirks but compared to, say, C++... well... > Well, I'm only looking at it since Ada seems to be missing things like > widely-used/extensively-tested HTTP or crypto libraries. So I'll have to > figure out a way to using things like curl or openssl from Ada. I'm not > sure if something more complex than simple function is really necessary > for this. Because Ada isn't as main stream as some other languages the menu of third party libraries available written in Ada is less than you would be used to coming from Java. > Either way though, my point was that Barnes' book (judging by the table > of contents on Amazon) does not seem to concern itself with how to get > your program to do something useful. The Barnes book is encyclopedic but it's not exactly a book about designing with Ada. He talks about some of the issues, but his focus is on presenting the raw language. > How does Ada represent its strings internally? (Or more specifically, > what character set do the standard library functions for processing > strings assume/expect?). There are three character types and corresponding string types. Character Wide_Character Wide_Wide_Character String Wide_String Wide_Wide_String I'm sure the language lawyers here can set me straight if I get this wrong but my understanding is that Character is 8 bit ISO-8859-1, Wide_Character is 16 bit BMP part of ISO-10646, and Wide_Wide_Character is 32 bit full ISO-10646. Ada source text is now assumed to be UTF-8 (or is that compilers must provide a mode where they accept UTF-8?). > Is this covered by the reference manual for Ada? There is a lot of dense language in the Ada standard regarding character sets. Peter