Why write an Ada web browser ?, was: Re: GNAT Ada - DLL - MSVC

[clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP (Simon Clubley)]

In article <3D062F7D.406B8709@sympatico.ca>, David Marceau <davidmarceau@sympatico.ca> writes:
> 
> IMHO my dream multi-platform state-of-the-art gui:
> 1)The web browser itself and the web browser flash player plug-in should
> be re-written in ada.

I have been reading comp.lang.ada for about a year, and during that time
the wish for a web browser to be written in Ada has been made a number of
times.

So, my question is, why write a whole new web browser in Ada ?

Some advantages are obvious; an Ada browser shouldn't have problems with
buffer overflows.

However, I don't see how an Ada based browser would help with other
errors like cross-site scripting which I understand are mainly logic
errors.

Also, how much of the web browser would you write in Ada ? Just the core
of the browser or everything ?

To expand on that question:
	Would you write new Ada widgets to display JPEG/GIF/etc images,
	including the decoding/decompression of the image ?

	Would you write a Java Virtual Machine implementation in Ada ?

	How about FTP/Telnet/secure sockets, etc ?

What method would an Ada browser use to handle the requirement to
dynamically support plug-in modules and to execute the code within
that plug-in ? What would be the advantages of that method ?

And finally, would the work involved in writing an Ada browser be justified
by Ada's advantages ?

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP       
Microsoft: The Lada of the computing world.