Re: Introducing memcache-ada, a memcached client in Ada

[R Tyler Croy <tyler@linux.com>]

On 2010-12-20, Georg Bauhaus <rm.tsoh.plus-bug.bauhaus@maps.futureapps.de> wrote:
> On 20/12/2010 09:25, Thomas Løcke wrote:
>> I do though have four suggestions:
>> 
>> 1. Declare all the string literals ("STORED", "NOT_FOUND" and such) as
>> constants in the specification.
>
> Not sure why should they be public?  These are protocol words
> that I think a user will not want to deal with.
>
>> 3. Take a look at the various search subprograms in Ada.Strings.Fixed
>> and Ada.Strings.Unbounded. Some of them might be able to replace a loop
>> here or there.
>
> Key string scanning looks just right as is to me where,
> e.g., Is_Control is used, when verbiage will otherwise
> be needed to pack every pattern into one object suitable
> for Index.
>
> You could say
>
>   Key_Ch = ' '
> in place of
>   Character'Pos (Key_Ch) = 32
>
> or use the white space characterising functions (like you
> used is_control), or exclude everything with a lower 'Pos
> if memcached wants this.
>
> I'd add an occasional "constant" to the String objects'
> declarations in the declare blocks.  Compiler option
> -gnatwa warns about this and other issues.
>
> One more general comment, addressed to all interested:
> Don't we have a portable POSIX socket library?  As much as I'm
> fond of GNAT, placing GNAT's helpful, yet compiler specific
> libraries in every program will make them non-Ada (in a
> portability sense). In the case of sockets, I don't see a
> compelling need to be compiler specific?
>

I was thinking about this last night to be honest, I felt somewhat frustrated
with all the GNAT-specific calls I had in the code base. There is the
adasockets library <https://github.com/samueltardieu/adasockets> but when I was
starting out I was a little apprehensive abvout including a third-party
dependency (I don't know what other compilers somebody might want to use).


Not sure what the best solution is, but I can relate to your feelings towards
compiler-specific functionality.


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- R. Tyler Croy
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