Re: Ada95 for Windows 95 Reviewers Wanted

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

"I'm in no position to judge whether or not RR's bindings are of good
quality, but I think that my point is a valid one anyway.  The Ada
user community would not be well served by having lots of mutually
incompatible W95 binding products.  I would hope that the Ada
community is now mature enough to strongly resist such a trend!"

I disagre with the sentiment here. Ther is no point in standardizing
thick bindings of low quality. I am not saying anything about the
quality of the RR bindings, about which I too an not in a position
to judge. 

It is the "valid one anyway" in the above comment that I question. There is
certainly value in haveing generally available bindings, and in fact the
ARA recently formed a group specifically oriented to looking at bindings
to see which of them might qualify as being in this category.

I actually think it is much mre important to have a reasonably universal
thin binding since that is what tool vendors need (they are modifying
C generation stuff, they want something as close as possible to the
C binding anyway).

A well done, well documented, thick binding is a useful addition, but
only if it meets these criteria. That being done, I agre that it would
be very helpful if anyone producing bindings would disclaim both
copyrights and interface copyrights on the specs of what they do,
otherwise people will not want to bother trying to get involved with
making them comon anyway.