Re: Anybody in US using ADA ? One silly idea..

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

Kevin Cline wrote:
 >That document is now almost five years old.  Two years before that I
...and yet is still linked to on the main programming page. That's 
becase nothing in there has needed changing. That is *still* the policy 
at Mozilla.

> and MSVC 5.0.  Today most template code is portable, except for a
> couple of
> features not implemented by MSVC 6.0.  

More than a couple. None of the function generators work at all (try 
using a "for all" or "for each" template to insert something into or 
delete something from a container based on a predicate, which is pretty 
much what they were created for. It doesn't work.), and automatic 
instantiation doesn't work except in trivial cases. Large portions of 
boost are unusable too. Lots of the stuff that *is* usable requires you 
to manually specify the template parameters (because its 
auto-instantiation sucks). The only way you could possibly make any 
reasonably complicated template code "portable" is with conditional 
compliation, or by going out of your way to use the least-common 
denominator. With 2 or 3 platforms that you know about ahead of time you 
might be able to do that. Mozilla has to work with so many different 
sucky C++ compilers that the least common denominator is no templates at 
all.


> I think that Microsoft Ada 
> supports an even smaller subset of the Ada language.

That's a very good way of describing Microsoft C++ too. :-)

>>I don't really consider this an issue. Bindings to anything that has a C 
>>interface are almost trivial to generate.
> 
> 
> Do you mean they can be generated automatically?

Well...yes there are such generators about, but no, that's not what I 
meant. I typically prefer to create my *own* bindings by hand, and have 
no compunction about doing so, even when good bindings are already 
available. That's what I mean by "almost trivial". Its about the same 
amount of work as writing external funtion prototypes in C.