Re: Terminal emulator in Ada ?

[Kilgallen@eisner.decus.org.nospam (Larry Kilgallen)]

 In article <slrn8q10p5.ooq.njc@CC47532-A.ewndsr1.nj.home.com>,
   ncherry@home.net wrote:
> A friend of mine is interested in ADA and would like to find some
> source code to a terminal emulator written in ADA. Does anyone know of
> such an example? Any pointers would be appreciated

Ada has many strengths over competing languages to help a programmer
eliminate defects, but getting the programmer to pay attention to the
problem specification is not one of them.

I would expect a terminal emulator written in Ada to be not particularly
better than the raft of lousy terminal emulators written in C.  I have a
terminal emulator which I presume was written in C, and occasionally it
does crash.

Far more prevalent in the world of terminal emulators, however, are defects
in the way the terminal emulation is done, meaning the wrong actions are
taken.  At several successive yearly conferences I attend public Windows
stations have been provided, but only with what Microsoft calls a terminal
emulator.  It cannot display correctly with common ordinary programs at the
other end, but it does not crash.

Of course one possible reason it does not crash is that nobody can stand
to use it long enough for it to crash.