Re: howto make system calls (newbie question)

[tmoran@acm.org]

> out that in Kernighan & Ritchie (I don't have the ANSI C standard in front
> of me) it says there is a "Standard Library" that, while "not part of the
 Making Ada packages, even if they only consisted of "pragma Import"s,
seems very straightforward.  Why hasn't it been done?

> <time.h> clock
> <time.h> asctime
> <time.h> ctime
> <time.h> gmtime
> <time.h> localtime
> <time.h> strftime
  Perhaps this is a clue to the "why it hasn't been done question".
Some of this is pointless for Ada, since we already have Ada.Calendar.
And the formatting stuff, like asctime, seems to be a victim of the
"curse of creativity" - everyone has their own idea of what should
be done (see recent thread on date & time formatting routines).

  The simple translation into a bunch of "pragma Import"s is not
exactly exciting, and does not garner much money or fame for the
person who does the grunt work.

> A little thought about other things commonly supplied by most OS's would
> probably yield a bunch more ideas. Maybe we'd start seeing some posts in
> Comp.Lang.C(++) to the effect of "I can do XYZ in Ada - how do I do the same
> thing in C(++)?" and "Why doesn't C(++) provide me with a function/class to
> do ABC which I can do in Ada so easily?" (Maybe we can start some shill
> postings? :-)
>
> Just an idea....
  A good one!