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From: Ken Raeburn <raeburn@cygnus.com>
Subject: q: pkg for network/UNIX programming; system dependencies
Date: 1997/05/29
Message-ID: <tx1bu5ttzs3.fsf@cygnus.com>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 244873825
Organization: Cygnus Support, Cambridge MA
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-05-29T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>



I'm thinking about working on a couple small spare-time UNIX projects in
Ada95 to help familiarize myself with the language.  Most such projects
I'm considering right now make use of networking, both TCP and UDP.

I'm looking for a package to help me deal with UNIX system-defined types,
socket- and network-related types and functionality, domain name service,
etc.  I've looked at the "paradise" package, which seems to have some of
what I want, but the latest version I could find is about 3 years old,
only works on SunOS and HP-UX and with three specific compilers (none of
which is GNAT), and is specifically conditionalized in various places for
those systems and compilers.  If that's the closest thing available, I'll
go with it; I just wanted to know if there's anything else.


Oh and a general question: How do you usually deal with OS or
configuration dependencies in Ada?  For example, some systems have the
utmpx functions, some don't; some have wait4, some don't.  Maybe I'm
building a package with a backwards-compatibility option enabled; maybe
it's disabled.  In C and UNIX, I'd use #ifdef and maybe an
autoconf-generated script to test the system characteristics and
user-provided options, and define some macros for conditional
compilation.

The conditionally-compiled region can be very small.  Of course, there
are times when it's large, and when it seems worthwhile to use a separate
source file.  But there are times when it isn't and it doesn't....

TIA,
Ken