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From: Andre Spiegel <spiegel@inf.fu-berlin.de>
Subject: Re: GNAT for Unix systems programming?
Date: 1997/03/11
Message-ID: <x2rahmfumg.fsf@inf.fu-berlin.de>#1/1
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References: <5g3iao$agt@fg70.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de>
Organization: Freie Universitaet Berlin
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Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-03-11T00:00:00+00:00
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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.