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From: email@domain.com (Dale Stanbrough)
Subject: Re: About to give up...
Date: 1998/08/06
Message-ID: <email-0608982217250001@dale.ppp.cs.rmit.edu.au>#1/1
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References: <6qbtl7$v6$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>
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Organization: RMIT
NNTP-Posting-Date: 6 Aug 1998 12:16:16 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1998-08-06T12:16:16+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

Mr i96danma@my-dejanews.com wrote:

" I've been programming in Ada 95 for a while and like the language because of
  it's strong type checking, OO-friendly style and clean and understandable
  code.
  
  Just recently I stepped into the world of Win32-programming and got hold of
  the Win32Ada binding, which I after some effort and a lot of help (thanks
  Jesper!) finally got working.
  
  The first steps were no problem and I quickly got used to the API. The worst
  problems though were the type conversions, where Ada's type checking suddenly
  was an obstacle to overcome, and the fact that you always have to take care of
  the return values, even if you don't care. And it seems as Win32 returns a lot
  of values that are, most of the time, unimportant."

I view this as being a good thing. The functions are returning a value for 
a reason (i presume!). Surely it is ignore at your peril?
If you really don't like it, or don't want an if statement at each step
you can either

   write a wrapper function to give it a procedure call syntax, which
   can either ignore the return result, or raise an exception

or

   do...

      dummy : integer range 0..0;

      dummy := some_function_call (...);

and have a constraint error exception if the function returns a dud value
(presuming 0 = ok).

 
" Altogether I see these drawbacks as (almost) impossible to overcome and have
  been thinking of starting to use C/C++ instead, after all it's the "native
  language" of Win32. I'd like to stick to Ada, but..."
  
Perhaps using the automatic bindings generator would a good way to go. Certainly
handcrafting Ada bindings is a long and laborious task.

Dale