From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,2d2df3e9ad18fa63 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-06-21 13:34:45 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newsfeed1.uni2.dk!news.get2net.dk.POSTED!53ab2750!not-for-mail Sender: malo@niflheim.malonet Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: ISO/IEC 14519 - Ada POSIX binding References: <87znkbqmby.fsf@deneb.enyo.de> From: Mark Lorenzen Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: 22 Jun 2003 00:38:20 +0200 NNTP-Posting-Host: 62.84.221.216 X-Complaints-To: abuse@colt-telecom.dk X-Trace: news.get2net.dk 1056227684 62.84.221.216 (Sat, 21 Jun 2003 22:34:44 CEST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 21 Jun 2003 22:34:44 CEST Organization: Colt Telecom Kunde Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:39540 Date: 2003-06-22T00:38:20+02:00 List-Id: Florian Weimer writes: > Mark Lorenzen writes: > > > So my big question is therefore: What's wrong with ISO/IEC 14519? It > > is of course pretty big, but that is a natural consequence of POSIX > > being big. > > There is no affordable documentation, for a start. POSIX.5 itself is > rather expensive. There is no publicly accessible implementation. As > a result, hardly anybody knows how the interface "feels" in practice. > > The rest of POSIX.5 has severe design deficiencies; I think it's > reasonable to assume that binding to the BSD sockets API is not much > better. (Sorry if this is sent twice) Personally I do not think that 44 CFH (approx. 33 USD) is expensive: http://www.iso.org/iso/en/CatalogueDetailPage.CatalogueDetail?CSNUMBER=34354&ICS1=35&ICS2=60&ICS3= And we have a publicly available implementation called 'florist': http://libre.act-europe.fr/GNAT/ You are correct that POSIX is not perfect, but it is PORTABLE and supported by a lot of interesting platforms. If we want to persuade people to using Ada instead of the "usual" languages for anything else than real-time or embedded systems, then we NEED support for POSIX. At the company where I work, we have just finished a proposal for a system that initially must run on Solaris and must then later be ported to Linux. What is the key here? POSIX! The system consists of several UNIX processes and makes use of networking sockets, message queues, real-time signals, memory mapping and memory locking (but not shared memory). While POSIX may not be perfekt it is what is used in the "real" world. We are not all fortunate enough to work on real-time embedded software projects, where one can afford to write a driver for some special hardware. There are a lot of applications outside the embedded world that can benefit from Ada. And in that world strange things like inter-process communicationa, shared memory and such really matters. - Mark