Re: Pro*Ada and Gnat

[bbalfour@std.caci.com (Brad Balfour)]

In article <5f9hlt$7j9@hetre.wanadoo.fr>, Rosen.Adalog@wanadoo.fr wrote:

>We have been unable to use Pro*Ada (Oracle) with Gnat. Apparently,
>Pro*Ada uses heavily unchecked_conversions between pointers and
>adresses, and other doubtful features; has anyone succeded to use
>Pro*Ada with Gnat ?

In 1995 and early 1996, the Airfields project (one of the AJPO sponsored
Ada 95 Transition Partnership Projects) ran up against this same barrier.
The project's conclusion was that the Pro*Ada bindings and tools are
compiler specific -- they only work with the Ada 83 VADS compiler and no
other. The project attempted to make use of the suggestions from ACT
regarding fat vs. thin pointers. However, this was not enough to overcome
the compiler specific choices made in the Pro*Ada bindings. In many
places, the binding does not hard code rep spec values, but rather depends
on the memory size allocations that VADS chooses for Ada objects to match
the C code. GNAT's choices did not match. Since the C headers are *not*
provided with Pro*Ada, and the Ada code does not have rep specs, the
project was unable to match GNAT to the Pro*Ada bindings.

Instead, this project made use of the Ada SQL Connect product from OIS
<http://www.ois.com>. The software enabled the use of Oracle from Ada
95/GNAT via ODBC. It worked very well.

Brad

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Brad Balfour
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