From: Andre Spiegel <spiegel@inf.fu-berlin.de>
Subject: Re: GNAT for Unix systems programming?
Date: 1997/03/11
Date: 1997-03-11T00:00:00+00:00 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <x2rahmfumg.fsf@inf.fu-berlin.de> (raw)
In-Reply-To: 5g3iao$agt@fg70.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de
Thomas Koenig writes:
> I'd like to know how good GNAT is for systems programming under
> Unix, especially for networking.
I've used GNAT for low-level network programming under UNIX, and my
experiences are very good. As far as I know, there are no standard
bindings in these areas, so you normally need to import those
definitions that you actually need yourself. However, I've found that
with a good, not-too-thin Ada binding (even if I have to create it
myself), I get much clearer, more robust code than if I write the same
thing in C. It is definitely worth the effort, in my opinion.
Andre Spiegel
Free University of Berlin
PS. By "not-too-thin Ada binding" I mean basically two things:
(a) Try to avoid System.Address, (b) let your binding functions
raise exceptions if anything goes wrong, so that you needn't do C-type
checking of return values, which is pretty tedious and easily
forgotten.
The nice thing about GNAT in particular is that it interfaces so
cleanly and predictably with the C side.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~1997-03-11 0:00 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 5+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
1997-03-11 0:00 GNAT for Unix systems programming? Thomas Koenig
1997-03-11 0:00 ` Andre Spiegel [this message]
1997-03-11 0:00 ` Mats Weber
1997-03-11 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
1997-03-12 0:00 ` Thomas Koenig
replies disabled
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox