Re: Ada & Posix

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

Markus says

<<And as a consequence, not much portable system programming for
Unix in Ada seems to be going on at the moment and GNAT seems to
be mostly used for teaching the language since C development
environments still provide a much richer API at the moment
and every Ada developer has to first come up with his private
subet binding to the C libraries before he can start with the
actual project.
>>

Actually GNAT is being used in a wide variety of large scale commercial
projects on Unix. Some customers have indeed been interested in a Posix
interface, which is why we are working with Ted Baker's team at FSU to
integrate Florist with the GNAT release.

However, in our experience there are many users of GNAT under Unix who
prefer to use pragma Import to get at whatever facilities they need, or
who are using other bindings. The demand for a Posix interface is by
no means as universal as Markus seems to think it is.

Of course I understand the "if only Ada 95 provided XXX, then all the
world would flock from C/C++ to Ada 95."  I look on all such claims
with what the US Secretary of Defence called an "Ohio attitude", namely
I won't be convinced till I see some evidence that such a claim is true :-)

Robert Dewar
Ada Core Technologies