Re: How (or Where?) to get started on Ada? (Properly)

[e.s.harney@gmail.com]

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?

> writing bindings to function libraries (code written in
> C, say) is a concept from the 1970s.

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.

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. My guess is that in order to do so it would probably need another 200-300 pages explaining how to get your program to interact with the rest of the world.

> ISO 10646 is mandatory for
> current Ada, so UTF-8 won't be a problem.

That is interesting. What I had found through Google was this http://commons.ada.cx/Unicode which isn't really that helpful. 

How does Ada represent its strings internally? (Or more specifically, what character set do the standard library functions for processing strings assume/expect?).

Strings seem to be a hairy detail in many languages. Go uses uses utf8 everywhere; C has utf8 mostly these days but there's still things like wchar (and associated w* string function) around; Java uses UTF-16 and surrogate pairs; Python had something similar in version 2, but changed it to being fully-transparent (switches between 1-4 byte representation as needed) in version 3, and presents users only with characters; etc.

Is this covered by the reference manual for Ada?

On Wednesday, September 4, 2013 12:25:24 PM UTC+2, G.B. wrote:
> On 04.09.13 11:14, e.s.h...@gmail.com wrote:
> 
> > I'm not sure of how helpful it will be in covering all details that are relevant to writing useful software these days (things like utf8, interfacing with C, etc.).
> 
> 
> 
> That would depend on what "these days" turns out to be;
> 
> writing bindings to function libraries (code written in
> 
> C, say) is a concept from the 1970s. Not surprisingly,
> 
> that's a technique present in Ada's definition (LRM B.3,
> 
> B.4, and B.5). Still used. ISO 10646 is mandatory for
> 
> current Ada, so UTF-8 won't be a problem.
> 
> 
> 
> "These days", on PC hardware, chances are that binding
> 
> objects/types is more adequate than binding functions,
> 
> even on GNU/Linux.
> 
> Actually, Ada compilers for .NET or for the JVM do
> 
> just that in a natural way using tagged types.