Re: Estimates on building bindings

[twestley@acm.org (Terry J. Westley)]

Brad Balfour asks for data to help with estimating
costs of C-to-Ada conversions using c2ada:

My experience with building Ada bindings for Tcl/Tk
(http://www.ocsystems.com/xada/tash/) may not help
you much because:

a) I tried to use c2ada and abandoned it, and

b) since I was doing this on my own time, I didn't
   keep track of the time.

Why I abandoned c2ada:
======================
It did a fairly good job of converting the .h file
(my sample size was small: 1).  However, I also wanted
to produce a more Ada-friendly, shall we say, "thick"
binding.  Since a new version of Tcl/Tk comes out fairly
often, I need to track these changes and didn't want to
to hand-convert the changes into a thick binding each
time.  So, I wrote a custom C-to-Ada converter which
is specialized for the Tcl header file.  It reads the
tcl.h file and produced both thin and thick binding
packages (specs and bodies).

Didn't keep track of the time:
==============================
Since reading Humphrey's book, _Introduction_to_the_PSP_,
I now know that was a mistake.

Yes, he sold at least one book from doing his talk at
TRI-Ada, but after reading it, I realized that I should
have bought his more comprehensive, earlier book,
titled (approximately) _A_Discipline_for_Software_Engineering_.

Not much help, I know, but there it is anyway.

-- 
Terry J. Westley
twestley@acm.org
http://www.buffnet.net/~westley/
http://www.ocsystems.com/xada/tash/