Re: [announcement] SYSAPI and SYSSVC for Windows

[Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@acm.org>]

"Ekkehard Morgenstern" <ekkehard.morgenstern@onlinehome.de> writes:

> "Jeffrey Carter" <spam@spam.com> wrote:
> > > I'd like to announce the new version of my SYSAPI / SYSSVC packages
> > > for Windows.
> > 
> > What are they? What do they do?
> 
> SYSAPI is a package that interfaces directly to the Microsoft Windows API.

More precisely, to a _very_ small subset, dealing with synchronous and
asynchronous file IO.

> I will also add windowing and graphics support (especially for DirectX 
> Graphics, formerly known as DirectDraw and Direct 3D), and also audio and
> video support.

Before you do that, you should look at the other Ada Windows bindings
out there; see www.adapower.com. Rather than start another one,
consider adding to one of those; that will be much more useful.

> For now, it contains only file services, namely 64-bit synchronous and
> asynchronous services. I've seen that the GNAT libraries do not provide
> those, and hence I had to write my own. I need 64-bit file I/O for a 
> database project of my own (to allow for files bigger than 4 GB).

ok. Even better would be to add this to the GNAT Ada.Text_IO runtime!
If you get it working, I bet ACT would be happy to include it in GNAT.

As for style, it is better to provide at least some comments in the
spec saying what the functions do. Since you say these are not thin
bindings, I have no idea what the various functions are for, beyond
the English meaning of their names.

You have constants CFALSE and CTRUE in the spec; that doesn't sound
like a thick Ada binding, it sounds like a thin one. Almost every
function returns a CBOOL, or has a CBOOL out parameter; what do they
mean? A thick Ada binding should raise exceptions for errors (or one
exception, with an error message string).

-- 
-- Stephe