Re: questions on Ada openGL binding in the GLOBE3D packages

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

"Niklas Holsti" <niklas.holsti@tidorum.invalid> wrote in message 
news:a7v2ieFpstU1@mid.individual.net...
...
> IMO, it is neater and less trouble to use the same style of identifiers
> for my native Ada code and for the bound libraries from other languages.
> I think that is one of the desirable features of a binding, even a thin
> binding.

Not to mention that automated style-checking tools would reject/modify names 
in mixed case style. (It's a clear violation of pretty much every Ada style 
guide I've ever seen.

And personally, whenever I type identifiers, they naturally come out in the 
Ada style. On the rare occassions when they need to be in some other style 
(as in specifing link names in interfacing pragmas), I usually have to type 
them several times.

Ergo, if you want a binding to be useful to the experienced Ada programmer, 
it has to use identifiers that fit the style of experienced Ada programmers.

IMHO, I do agree with you that a binding that changes the names is not a 
"thin" binding. "Thin" bindings are unusable; they should only be used for 
temporary (one-off) code. Anything else needs at least what I call a 
"medium" binding: routines with similar semantics to the original ones, but 
an Ada-ized interface with better names, far fewer pointers, and exceptions 
rather than error codes. (The project that became Claw was originally 
intended to produce a "medium" binding for Win32. Eventually it morphed into 
Claw, a classic "thick" binding.)

(I don't want any of my code to *ever* look anything like C -- I want clean, 
elegant code, not barely intelligible symbols and loads of dangerous 
pointers. YMMV. :-)

                                                          Randy.