Re: binding thickness indicator, was Re: GNAT, OS/2, Libraries

[emery@grebyn.com (David Emery)]

In article <4l88ik$ed2@news.tamu.edu>, ron@cs.tamu.edu (Ron J Theriault) wrote:

> In article <4kjaib$bhc@news2.delphi.com>, tmoran@bix.com writes:
> |> I propose we use something analogous to house insulation 'R-values'
> |> for indicating the thickness of a binding.  R1 would be the thinnest
> |> possible, a la single pane window glass, like Tore's example of
> |> interfacing to a C routine.  R50 would indicate such thickness and
> |> insulation that, say, code using an R50 windowing GUI binding would be
> |> portable across Mac, Windows, OS/2, and X-Windows.  R5 might be the
> |> Ada flavor he mentions (type and range checked parameters, raise
> |> exception instead of returning success/fail flag, etc) , but pretty
> |> much still tied to the particular design, style, and widget offerings
> |> of a particular system.  Clearly not an exact measurement, but
> |> somewhat more specific than thick/thin.
> 
> You've been watching "This Old House" too long!  :-)
> 
> If a binding is portable across Macs, X-Windows, and others, just
> what is it a binding to?  It would seem to be a binding
> to a platform independent graphical toolkit of your invention.
> -- 
> Ron Theriault              |   
> CS Department              |   In a democracy, you only have to fool
> Texas A&M Univ.            |   most of the people, most of the time.
> ron@cs.tamu.edu            |   

Although I do not agree with Tmoran's "binding thickness scores" at all,
I would like to point out that there are several commercial products that
provide a uniform API to a variety of windowing platforms (e.g. X, Motif,
MS-Win, Mac, etc.)  At least one of them, XVT, has a vendor-supported Ada
binding.  For those of you attending STC next week, I strongly recommend
you take a look at this.  XVT will be there (I think they're "teaming" with
someone.)

               dave

p.s.  disclaimer:  While at MITRE, we did a "proof-of-concept" Ada binding
to XVT that demonstrated that you could use XVT to write window-system-
independent applications in Ada.