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From: Stephen Leake <Stephen.Leake@gsfc.nasa.gov>
Subject: Re: What  is differance between thick and thin binding?
Date: 1999/08/10
Message-ID: <uyafjbgax.fsf@gsfc.nasa.gov>#1/1
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References: <934219556.19836@www.remarq.com>
 <7oo2d2$gjm$1@usenet01.srv.cis.pitt.edu> <37B0429C.EA2184F1@pwfl.com>
Organization: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center -- Greenbelt, Maryland USA
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1999-08-10T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

Marin David Condic <condicma@bogon.pwfl.com> writes:

> John Duncan wrote:
> 
> > The CLAW package and the Windex package are thick bindings. There, the
> > structure of the win32 SDK is not as obvious from the packages, rather they
> > are organized as an Ada-like front-end to the code written in "C".
> 
> My impression of CLAW was that it was substantially more than a "binding" - that
> it provided its own environment which rides on top of the Win32api, but does not
> attempt to exactly duplicate it. Perhaps this is more of a semantic issue, but
> I'd consider a thick binding to be one which provided a parallel set of
> subprogram interfaces to the Win32api (as an example) but which provided
> parameter types and passing mechanisms more suited to Ada. The best example is
> the nuisance of trying to turn an Ada string into a C string where a thick
> binding would just accept the Ada string and translate for you.

> 
> Or maybe we need degrees of thickness? When does a body of software stop being a
> binding and start being an entity in its own right?

Certainly when you start adding significant functionality, you are
getting beyond a binding. Making things easier to use by taking
advantage of Ada features doesn't count as new functionality.

Originally, I intended Windex to be "just" a thick binding, but now I
find myself adding functionality, in the form of controls for dates
and times. Still, it is in the spirit of the Win32 API, which has
controls at a similar level for files and fonts, so I still consider
Windex to be a thick binding.

I haven't used CLAW much, but from what I've read, I don't think it
adds much functionality beyond Win32. It adds a task to enforce the
Win32 window tasking rules, but that can be seen as a binding from Ada
tasking to Win32 tasking. Significant value added for the programmer,
but not significant new functionality.

-- Stephe