Re: networking support?

[Maciej Sobczak <see.my.homepage@gmail.com>]

On 18 Gru, 13:47, Georg Bauhaus <rm.dash-bauh...@futureapps.de> wrote:

> How would your program benefit from first wrapping system
> functions (that use C conventions) in C++ classes only for
> having to match Ada's O-O types and C++'s O-O types in
> a second step?
> Seems like an artificial setup to me.

Except that a lot of things in the C world (especially in the system
APIs) are defined in header files as preprocessor constants, optional
or even unofficial structure fields or field order within a struct -
all this means that the binary layout of data structures is a big
question mark. This problem is particularly notorious with network
services.
There is no way to reasonably interface with all this mess from Ada
and having a wrapper layer that fixes some of this optional/unofficial/
ordering stuff for the Ada part is a valid option.
Now the question is how thick this adapter layer should be - and here
a layer that does a bit of lifetime management or error reporting in
addition to just parameter passing is also a valid solution.
Then you might discover that all the work that is done in this
adapting layer can be reused in C++ projects as well (it is a low-
hanging fruit, so why not benefit from it?) and you end up with a
regular C++ library that encapsulates some system services and is used
from the Ada program.
There is nothing artifical in it - it starts with a fundamental
feasibility issues and ends up with simple economy.

--
Maciej Sobczak * www.msobczak.com * www.inspirel.com

Database Access Library for Ada: www.inspirel.com/soci-ada