Re: Ideas for Ada 200X (Ada.Sockets)

["Tarjei T. Jensen" <tarjei@online.no>]

Robert A Duff  wrote:
> It seems better to say "here's the standard way to do it, but it's
> optional".  That's what the SN Annexes are for.  Then implementers
> can choose whether to implement it based on the needs of their
> customers.  After all, the purpose of standards is to encourage
> uniformity -- not to encourage implementers to provide functionality
> to their customers (the market is supposed to do the latter).

That is what is needed.

> Another alternative is just to have a de-facto standard for sockets.
>
> I use the GNAT sockets packages, even when I'm using non-GNAT compilers,
> and that seems to work OK for me.

If everybody used that, it would be perfectly OK. The point is that there
must be a reasonably sensible and agreed standard.

One could also add a layer to the socket library in order to simplify socket
programming for ordinary mortals. e.g. add a tcp client and server library.
This is not supposed to be something fancy; just something that hides the
ugly stuff and works reasonably well and with no surprises.

How simple should such a library be? Just four procedures: open_tcp_client,
open_tcp_server, read_tcp, write_tcp. That's it. The latter should ideally
be just aliases for more general read and write procedures/functions.

Regardless: There is an urgent need to decide what should be easy to do in
Ada in a general computing environment.

Som suggestions for improvement:
- strings. Let's get at least one type of strings that works like strings
are supposed to do.
- standardized file I/O library (at least a superset of text_io). This is
the stuff that breaks programming languages.
- a *simple* console I/O package (text terminal). These days one can assume
at least a vt100. Preferably something that works seamlessly with both 7 and
8 bit escape sequences.
- standardized socket library. Ideally two layers; raw - C-like and a simple
binding.

In addition one could create soft standards which includes freely available
software. e.g. AWS, GNADE

The softness might just be that the package is documented and examples
provided.

greetings,



greetings,