Re: Why no socket package in the standard ?

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Florian Weimer" <fw@deneb.enyo.de> wrote in message 
news:87k4d4z6b6.fsf@mid.deneb.enyo.de...
>* Randy Brukardt:
>
>> Defining a package spec is easy enough (many have done that), but 
>> describing
>> what it does in a target-independent way is a much bigger job. Note that
>> there is no ISO standard (so far as I'm aware) that describes BSD 
>> Sockets,
>> so we'd have to recreate at least some description of those in the Ada
>> Standard.
>
> I believe they are part of ISO/IEC 9945:2002.

You're right; I had forgotten that POSIX had an ISO standard. (I don't think 
we can reference the IEEE standards.)

But one wonders about the wisdom of requiring a particular OS interface for 
Ada -- Ada is supposed to be target-independent. Perhaps it would be OK to 
reference a small piece of it.

> However, it turns out that there already is an ISO standard for an Ada
> interface to BSD sockets (which happens to include a file system
> interface, too): ISO/IEC 14519:2001.  Efforts to standardize operating
> system interfaces should rather concentrate on liberating that
> document to increase adoption, addressing open issues, if necessary;
> and not be wasted on duplicating it.  I think this offers a cautionary
> tale why proprietary standards can be really, really bad.

The POSIX standard is too low-level, IMHO, to be a very useful inclusion in 
the Ada standard. We have higher-level concepts in Ada for file management 
and tasking, for example (and Ada 2012 has a small amount of locale support 
as well), and that would seem to be appropriate for sockets as well. POSIX 
has it's place, of course, but it seems fine for it to be a separate 
standard -- most users have no reason to be writing at such a low level.

                           Randy.