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From: "G.B." <bauhaus@notmyhomepage.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Community Input for the Maintenance and Revision of the Ada
 Programming Language
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2017 07:41:52 +0200
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Date: 2017-08-10T07:41:52+02:00
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On 09.08.17 23:08, Luke A. Guest wrote:

> 1) endian aspects.
> 2) full Unicode support including sorting, character db, regexps, bounded
> and unbounded need, iterators for code points, graphème clusters, word
> boundaries, bidi, etc.

Unicode support can be a joint effort without major investments of time
and money:
practically adressing Randy Brukardt's remark that this is going to
require politics, there is libiconv, the Unicode related designs done
for the Swift language, java.text.*, and so forth.

> 3) cross platform GUI.

Care to elaborate why? Having seen cross platform GUIs fail in all but
corporate surroundings, and possibly games, even then, new proprietary
libraries like Metal seem to entail non-portable program designs again.
A portable abstract design of UIs could be economically more promising.
It fits the OS's ways and customers like that. Also removes one layer
of politics, support, and software, at least in parts.

> 4) multiple return types:
>
>   function Blah return Integer, Float;

Should other parameters in the subprogram's profile be non-variant,
co-variant, or contra-variant, or just what the programmer specifies?

> As an example.
>
> 5) Lambdas for the people looking for new (i.e. Old) trendy features.

Would you want lambdas that can be returned, or assigned? Or just
lambdas that are unnamed expression_function-s of Ada 2012?

> 6) support for offloading to gpu's.
> 7) memory mapped streams.
> 8) networking support packages.

It seems as if C, the language and library, has very few of
these additions and yet C is a good choice for embedded needs
if judging by market share. How do C programmers port their
networking code from Unix to Windows? Could Ada support packages
provide convincing advantages (politics...) because of the language?