Re: Community Input for the Maintenance and Revision of the Ada Programming Language

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Lucretia" <laguest9000@googlemail.com> wrote in message 
news:4527d955-a6fe-4782-beea-e59c3bb69f21@googlegroups.com...
...
>Again, you seem to be very myopic in that C and Ada are only used
>in embedded. I refer you back to [1] above. You seem to have forgotten
>this.
>
>Windows has sockets, it also has other networking libs available, people
>just tend to create platform specific ports on top of those libs, Ada could
>do the same.

The ARG sent out a call for APIs (really, a call for interfaces to possibly 
standardize) in 2003 (I think). What did we receive then and in the 
intervening years?? Absolutely nothing. Crickets. (We had decent success 
with doing a partial delegation for the containers library; we had two 
volunteers, we picked one, and Matt Heaney did a lot of hard work (including 
wrestling with the ARG) getting the containers into a standardizable form. 
But apparently no one else wanted to put in the time and money. (The link to 
that announcement can be found in the announcement that started this 
thread.)

That offer has remained open in the years since, and it's still open now (it 
was linked into the recent announcement to give it a refresh). The ARG does 
not have the manpower to do a lot of libraries in a form that can reasonably 
be added to the Standard. (Think a level of detail that would allow writing 
ACATS tests to prove proper operation.) If you really want these libraries, 
then put YOUR time and money where your month is. Otherwise, I'm sorry, 
they're not happening.

>Don't you people want Ada to grow into more areas? I've seen people
>look at the language because it seemed interesting to them, then ask,
>"Does Ada have a GUI lib?" or "Does Ada have OpenGL?" or "Does
>Ada have DirectX?" etc. When they are told no, they leave never to
>return, because this is what they want in a language's runtime.

Most of those things are not appropriate for a language standard. What we do 
has to either be stand-alone or tied to some other ISO/IEC standard. Things 
specific to a single OS like Windows aren't a possibility - those have to 
lie with the implementation (and the community, at least for open source 
users).

                                                  Randy.