Re: GNAT and Florist

[Mark Lorenzen <mark.lorenzen@ofir.dk>]

fmdf@tiscali.it (fabio de francesco) writes:

> Hello,
> 
> I'm trying to learn Ada95 since a couple of months, coming from C/C++.
> I must say that I find Ada much more powerful for writing code that
> works without hours of debugging like in C/C++ and that it is much
> more readable than the latters.
> 
> I use GNAT compiler on Linux and I want to write an Ada program that
> has to use the TCP/IP Socket API and maybe other POSIX API.
> It's not clear to me which packages I have to use, because I have
> heard of a library named Florist that would provide Sockets bindings (
> and othe POSIX bindings while I also found a package Ada.Sockets in
> GNAT.
> 
> My question is about when and why anyone should choose packages
> provided by Florist instead than the ones by GNAT.
> 
> Thank you all in advance,
> 
> Fabio De Francesco.

Florist is an implementation of the ISO/IEC standard 14519 and defines
a binding the system calls and library functions defined by POSIX.

The socket bindings in GNAT are good enough if you want to do socket
programming, but they are not a complete binding to POSIX. If you want
to use other POSIX functions such as shared memory, memoty locking,
process signalling, select() system call, address resolver, read(),
write(), readv(), writev() etc., then you should go for Florist.

The ISO/IEC 14519 standard consists of nearly 900 pages, but it is
very clear and informative. It is actually a much better source for
learning POSIX than the usual C API.

Regards,
- Mark Lorenzen