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=-0.4 required=5.0 tests=AC_FROM_MANY_DOTS,BAYES_00 autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,33a6944ba1b879de X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2002-12-07 07:26:45 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!canoe.uoregon.edu!arclight.uoregon.edu!wn14feed!wn12feed!worldnet.att.net!207.217.77.102!newsfeed2.earthlink.net!newsfeed.earthlink.net!stamper.news.pas.earthlink.net!stamper.news.atl.earthlink.net!harp.news.atl.earthlink.net!not-for-mail From: "Marin David Condic" Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Modern copy of GNAT for OpenVMS? Date: Sat, 7 Dec 2002 10:26:31 -0500 Organization: MindSpring Enterprises Message-ID: References: <3DEF8BDB.7050009@acm.org> <9yPmFNnjB6V5@eisner.encompasserve.org> NNTP-Posting-Host: d1.56.b4.9b X-Server-Date: 7 Dec 2002 15:31:26 GMT X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2314.1300 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2314.1300 Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:31531 Date: 2002-12-07T15:31:26+00:00 List-Id: Very true. It is a problem that OS's all have different ways of doing things. In some ways, its "Innovation" and in other ways its a handicap. Back in the olden days, you could count on your garden variety user-style OS (as opposed to something embedded or otherwise specialized) providing you with basically sequential, random and text IO with some version of a teletype as your user interaction device. At that time, what Ada provided was sufficient to accomplish portability across a multitude of platforms - possibly excepting IBM mainframes where the terminals behaved dramatically different and character sets were not compatible with the standard. Now you've got a variety of windowing systems and networking systems and file systems that may each have their own advantages, but it makes any sort of portability difficult. You either fully utilize what is available to you or you have to opt for the least common denominator - which may put you back at a glass teletype and fairly primitive files - with maybe networking since Sockets are fairly common - yet often with subtle differences. So given that portability of user-style apps is pretty much impossible without making the app very primitive, should we be so concerned about it? Standardization is nice, but unachievable on some levels, so maybe it ought not to be such an overwhelming concern for Ada. At least not where it might involve big libraries of OS related things? (IOW, try to arrive at a common subset of features, but allow divergence for different implementations. Example: Make a root package for some subset of OS features and allow implementations to make their own child packages for extended features with the caveat being that if you use them, you are not portable.) MDC -- ====================================================================== Marin David Condic I work for: http://www.belcan.com/ My project is: http://www.jast.mil/ Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ a c m . o r g "I'd trade it all for just a little more" -- Charles Montgomery Burns, [4F10] ====================================================================== Larry Kilgallen wrote in message news:9yPmFNnjB6V5@eisner.encompasserve.org... > > The problem is that what is "normal" for one operating system is not > at all "normal" for another. Even the alleged DLM port to Tru64 is > quite different than the original on VMS.