Re: Thinking of using Ada for a job at home. Couple of questions first.

[tmoran@acm.org]

>I think I agree with Dmitry, "reading the octet stream or else what is
>natural for the device or the protocol at hand, and then constructing
>the necessary Ada objects on the fly".

  CLAW's bitmap routines have an abstract Root_DIBitmap_Type, with monochrome,
VGA, 24 bit color, etc derived types.  For reading a bmp file
    function Read (Filename : in String)
        return Claw.Bitmaps.Root_DIBitmap_Type'class;
internally reads the header bytes, then creates an object of the correct
derived type, reads the data into it, and returns that.  Works just fine.

I don't know about MIDI, but for wav and video Windows generally assumes
you can't do accurate timing, but it can.  So your routines either operate
at a high level or are called as callbacks if they have to execute at an
accurate time.  Ada tasking works just fine for me with audio/video stuff.