* Grace 0.51 released
@ 2003-10-27 16:56 Stephen Leake
2003-10-27 17:07 ` Stephane Richard
` (2 more replies)
0 siblings, 3 replies; 12+ messages in thread
From: Stephen Leake @ 2003-10-27 16:56 UTC (permalink / raw)
I've made a new release of Grace, _the_ community Ada library :).
Config_Files has been improved. See
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/grace/.
In the context of the long-lasting "yet another Ada library" thread,
remember all the discussion a couple years ago about Grace? How many
people have contributed? Two.
If we do get a community library going, let's at least use the name
Grace (for Grace Hopper), and not CAL or whatever.
--
-- Stephe
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 12+ messages in thread
* Re: Grace 0.51 released
2003-10-27 16:56 Grace 0.51 released Stephen Leake
@ 2003-10-27 17:07 ` Stephane Richard
2003-10-27 17:18 ` Ed Falis
2003-10-28 0:17 ` Nick Roberts
2003-10-30 21:20 ` Russ
2 siblings, 1 reply; 12+ messages in thread
From: Stephane Richard @ 2003-10-27 17:07 UTC (permalink / raw)
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*laughing pathetically* would you believe I didn't know you were the author
of Grace until this post? Haven't paid attention on the website as to who
it belonged to and from your post I didn't get that it was yours. *kicks
himself in the (_|_) a couple times more* ;-).
I haven't looked at the code however either. I'm sure then I would have
recognized you and your high code quality :-).
--
St�phane Richard
"Ada World" Webmaster
http://www.adaworld.com
"Stephen Leake" <Stephe.Leake@nasa.gov> wrote in message
news:u4qxuei06.fsf@nasa.gov...
> I've made a new release of Grace, _the_ community Ada library :).
> Config_Files has been improved. See
> http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/grace/.
>
>
> In the context of the long-lasting "yet another Ada library" thread,
> remember all the discussion a couple years ago about Grace? How many
> people have contributed? Two.
>
> If we do get a community library going, let's at least use the name
> Grace (for Grace Hopper), and not CAL or whatever.
>
> --
> -- Stephe
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 12+ messages in thread
* Re: Grace 0.51 released
2003-10-27 17:07 ` Stephane Richard
@ 2003-10-27 17:18 ` Ed Falis
2003-10-27 17:19 ` Stephane Richard
2003-10-28 0:55 ` Robert I. Eachus
0 siblings, 2 replies; 12+ messages in thread
From: Ed Falis @ 2003-10-27 17:18 UTC (permalink / raw)
Nah, wasn't Ed Berard the author of the GRACE components?
;-)
- Ed
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 12+ messages in thread
* Re: Grace 0.51 released
2003-10-27 17:18 ` Ed Falis
@ 2003-10-27 17:19 ` Stephane Richard
2003-10-27 17:42 ` Ed Falis
2003-10-28 0:55 ` Robert I. Eachus
1 sibling, 1 reply; 12+ messages in thread
From: Stephane Richard @ 2003-10-27 17:19 UTC (permalink / raw)
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I dont know...now I'm confused...oh well...
--
St�phane Richard
"Ada World" Webmaster
http://www.adaworld.com
"Ed Falis" <falis@verizon.net> wrote in message
news:oprxpozddt8wdn3j@news.verizon.net...
> Nah, wasn't Ed Berard the author of the GRACE components?
>
> ;-)
>
> - Ed
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 12+ messages in thread
* Re: Grace 0.51 released
2003-10-27 17:19 ` Stephane Richard
@ 2003-10-27 17:42 ` Ed Falis
0 siblings, 0 replies; 12+ messages in thread
From: Ed Falis @ 2003-10-27 17:42 UTC (permalink / raw)
On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 17:19:50 GMT, Stephane Richard
<stephane.richard@verizon.net> wrote:
> I dont know...now I'm confused...oh well...
>
No reason not to be - it's an overloaded name. And the worse so, because
the first GRACE components were also an Ada product.
- Ed
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 12+ messages in thread
* Re: Grace 0.51 released
2003-10-27 16:56 Grace 0.51 released Stephen Leake
2003-10-27 17:07 ` Stephane Richard
@ 2003-10-28 0:17 ` Nick Roberts
2003-10-28 2:10 ` Marin David Condic
2003-10-29 21:16 ` Simon Wright
2003-10-30 21:20 ` Russ
2 siblings, 2 replies; 12+ messages in thread
From: Nick Roberts @ 2003-10-28 0:17 UTC (permalink / raw)
Stephen Leake wrote:
> I've made a new release of Grace, _the_ community Ada library :).
> Config_Files has been improved. See
> http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/grace/.
>
> In the context of the long-lasting "yet another Ada library" thread,
> remember all the discussion a couple years ago about Grace? How many
> people have contributed? Two.
Only one person has contributed to Tenet so far (me ;-)
> If we do get a community library going, let's at least use the name
> Grace (for Grace Hopper), and not CAL or whatever.
Or alternatively, let's call it 'Charles', or maybe 'ASCL', or 'Booch', or
'PragmARC', or 'GAPSE', or 'AdaSL', or 'SAL', or 'Tenet', or ...
In fact, my guess is that it's going to be called 'Ada'. I believe the ARG
are interested in introducing a basic set of containers into the next
revision, although it might be in a an optional annex, and they might well
simply decide not to (probably because of lack of time). If you're
interested, please look at AI-302:
http://www.ada-auth.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/AIs/AI-10302.TXT
This proposal is huge, but it is currently undergoing revision to
significantly reduce it. I think the proposal, submitted by Matthew Heaney
and based on Charles, is basically very good.
The reason why I've not given up on Tenet yet is that, to my knowledge,
no-one else is going to produce implementations of a list and a map that
support clustering (dynamic storage in a linked list or tree of smallish
arrays of the element type). If someone is able to correct me about this,
I'd be very grateful. (For a start, I am not very familiar with the Booch
collection.) Clustering affects the specification in a small but
significant way: you need to be able to specify the clustering factor (the
number of elements per array). As far as I'm concerned, clustering is going
to be vital to the efficiency of my future projects.
The ARG follows the principle that 'the market should decide' about a
particular technology before it is incorporated into the Ada standard. But
it doesn't follow this principle (or any other principle) slavishly. I feel
it is one possible reason why the ARG might reject any container proposal
for the next revision, and to be honest I think that if they do they might
be right. They will have to judge whether the benefits outweigh the risks.
Links to some of the the projects I mentioned are:
http://home.earthlink.net/~matthewjheaney/charles/
http://www.adapower.net/booch/
http://home.earthlink.net/~jrcarter010/pragmarc.htm
http://adasl.sourceforge.net/
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ramatthews/ [for GAPSE]
http://ascl.sourceforge.net/
http://tenet.berlios.de
I hope it won't seem out of place for me to say here that I write this with
nothing but benign intent, and a lot of respect, toward the various people
who have worked hard on their own container projects.
--
Nick Roberts
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 12+ messages in thread
* Re: Grace 0.51 released
2003-10-27 17:18 ` Ed Falis
2003-10-27 17:19 ` Stephane Richard
@ 2003-10-28 0:55 ` Robert I. Eachus
1 sibling, 0 replies; 12+ messages in thread
From: Robert I. Eachus @ 2003-10-28 0:55 UTC (permalink / raw)
Ed Falis wrote:
> Nah, wasn't Ed Berard the author of the GRACE components?
Definitely the original author.
--
Robert I. Eachus
"Quality is the Buddha. Quality is scientific reality. Quality is the
goal of Art. It remains to work these concepts into a practical,
down-to-earth context, and for this there is nothing more practical or
down-to-earth than what I have been talking about all along...the repair
of an old motorcycle." -- from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 12+ messages in thread
* Re: Grace 0.51 released
2003-10-28 0:17 ` Nick Roberts
@ 2003-10-28 2:10 ` Marin David Condic
2003-10-29 21:16 ` Simon Wright
1 sibling, 0 replies; 12+ messages in thread
From: Marin David Condic @ 2003-10-28 2:10 UTC (permalink / raw)
Nick Roberts wrote:
> Stephen Leake wrote:
>> In the context of the long-lasting "yet another Ada library" thread,
>> remember all the discussion a couple years ago about Grace? How many
>> people have contributed? Two.
>
>
> Or alternatively, let's call it 'Charles', or maybe 'ASCL', or 'Booch',
> or 'PragmARC', or 'GAPSE', or 'AdaSL', or 'SAL', or 'Tenet', or ...
>
And therein ought to lie a clue as to how successful all this can be in
getting a Conventional Ada Library going. Grace and others were well
meaning efforts that depended on volunteers with no real sanction by
anybody in the Ada compiler business and no funding of any sort. They
basically languished or were not adopted in any wholesale manner. It
isn't to criticize the efforts - just to realize that we are *not* going
to get some kind of conventional library going by volunteering for
another effort at remaking things that have not succeeded in becoming a
standard already. Its been *TRIED* numerous times before. If its going
to work, it needs a different model.
If everyone wanted to get on board with Grace (or Charles, or ASCL or
Booch or PragmARC, or....) I'd be with them. What is going to get one of
these accepted as the basis on which to build a bigger "Conventional Ada
Library"??? I just don't see it happening without even one vendor on
board. Nor do I see it succeeding long term without some kind of money
invested.
Lets quit kidding ourselves that we'll all invest thousands of hours in
building a library without any compensation for the good of Ada and
expect that all the Ada users will suddenly hop on board and start using
what we've so generously given them. It hasn't worked. It isn't going to
work. Let's find a different way to do it.
MDC
--
======================================================================
Marin David Condic
I work for: http://www.belcan.com/
My project is: http://www.jsf.mil/NSFrames.htm
Send Replies To: m o d c @ a m o g
c n i c . r
"So if I understand 'The Matrix Reloaded' correctly, the Matrix is
basically a Microsoft operating system - it runs for a while and
then crashes and reboots. By design, no less. Neo is just a
memory leak that's too hard to fix, so they left him in... The
users don't complain because they're packed in slush and kept
sedated"
-- Marin D. Condic
======================================================================
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 12+ messages in thread
* Re: Grace 0.51 released
2003-10-28 0:17 ` Nick Roberts
2003-10-28 2:10 ` Marin David Condic
@ 2003-10-29 21:16 ` Simon Wright
2003-10-30 22:17 ` Nick Roberts
1 sibling, 1 reply; 12+ messages in thread
From: Simon Wright @ 2003-10-29 21:16 UTC (permalink / raw)
Nick Roberts <nick.roberts@acm.org> writes:
> The reason why I've not given up on Tenet yet is that, to my
> knowledge, no-one else is going to produce implementations of a list
> and a map that support clustering (dynamic storage in a linked list
> or tree of smallish arrays of the element type). If someone is able
> to correct me about this, I'd be very grateful. (For a start, I am
> not very familiar with the Booch collection.) Clustering affects the
> specification in a small but significant way: you need to be able to
> specify the clustering factor (the number of elements per array). As
> far as I'm concerned, clustering is going to be vital to the
> efficiency of my future projects.
I would be fairly amazed if anyone produced such an implementation in
a general library without needing it themselves (certainly I won't for
the BCs, partly at least because I feel I don't understand the concept
totally!)
I guess what you have in mind is some performance requirement; state
that, maybe Charles or the BCs or whatever will do what you want,
maybe not ..
--
Simon Wright 100% Ada, no bugs.
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 12+ messages in thread
* Re: Grace 0.51 released
2003-10-27 16:56 Grace 0.51 released Stephen Leake
2003-10-27 17:07 ` Stephane Richard
2003-10-28 0:17 ` Nick Roberts
@ 2003-10-30 21:20 ` Russ
2 siblings, 0 replies; 12+ messages in thread
From: Russ @ 2003-10-30 21:20 UTC (permalink / raw)
Stephen Leake <Stephe.Leake@nasa.gov> wrote in message news:<u4qxuei06.fsf@nasa.gov>...
> I've made a new release of Grace, _the_ community Ada library :).
> Config_Files has been improved. See
> http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/grace/.
>
>
> In the context of the long-lasting "yet another Ada library" thread,
> remember all the discussion a couple years ago about Grace? How many
> people have contributed? Two.
>
> If we do get a community library going, let's at least use the name
> Grace (for Grace Hopper), and not CAL or whatever.
FYI, the name GRACE is also used for a free, open-source plotting tool
that I use almost daily. See http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Grace
From the website:
"Grace is a WYSIWYG 2D plotting tool for the X Window System and
M*tif. Grace runs on practically any version of Unix-like OS. As well,
it has been successfully ported to VMS, OS/2, and Win9*/NT/2000/XP
(some minor functionality may be missing, though)."
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 12+ messages in thread
* Re: Grace 0.51 released
2003-10-29 21:16 ` Simon Wright
@ 2003-10-30 22:17 ` Nick Roberts
2003-10-31 7:04 ` Simon Wright
0 siblings, 1 reply; 12+ messages in thread
From: Nick Roberts @ 2003-10-30 22:17 UTC (permalink / raw)
Simon Wright wrote:
>> [Tenet implementation will use clustering]
> I would be fairly amazed if anyone produced such an implementation in
> a general library without needing it themselves (certainly I won't for
> the BCs, partly at least because I feel I don't understand the concept
> totally!)
>
> I guess what you have in mind is some performance requirement; state
> that, maybe Charles or the BCs or whatever will do what you want,
> maybe not ..
Clustering is applicable to unbounded lists and unbounded maps (which I
call 'lookups'). As with other implementations, I intend to implement these
(in Tenet) by a (doubly) linked list and a linked tree respectively.
However, rather than having just one data element per node, as with usually
implementations, I will have a small array -- of fixed length -- for each
node, so that several data elements can be stored in each node (in the
array). This array is called a 'cluster array', and the nodes are called
'clusters'.
The basic idea is that by varying the length of the cluster array, it is
possible to adjust the trade off between higher memory efficiency (longer
arrays) and speed of operations (shorter arrays). At one extreme, the array
might have length 1; obviously this is the same as the usual
implementation. At the other extreme, one might have a very big array length.
For linked lists, each cluster (node) will be able to store the number of
data elements actually stored in its cluster array (from 1 to N, where N is
the cluster array length). In this way, arbitrary insertion and deletion of
elements can be achieved by the appropriate combination of inserting or
deleting clusters (nodes), and inserting or deleting data elements within
cluster arrays (by moving items and/or adjusting the dynamic length).
For lookups (maps), data elements are stored within cluster arrays sorted
by key. Insertion requires finding the correct position in the array (by
binary-chop search), and copying up the remainder. If the array is full, a
new cluster (node) has to be created. Deletion works the reverse way. The
tree is kept balanced using a standard AVL or RB algorithm.
I do indeed wish to use clustering for a particular application (which will
be called TDL, but that's another story). However, I feel that it is a very
general-purpose technique, suitable for most applications, and that it
should enable applications to achieve the right balance between memory and
speed efficiency.
Are there any existing container implementations which provide clustering?
--
Nick Roberts
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 12+ messages in thread
* Re: Grace 0.51 released
2003-10-30 22:17 ` Nick Roberts
@ 2003-10-31 7:04 ` Simon Wright
0 siblings, 0 replies; 12+ messages in thread
From: Simon Wright @ 2003-10-31 7:04 UTC (permalink / raw)
Nick Roberts <nick.roberts@acm.org> writes:
> Are there any existing container implementations which provide
> clustering?
Actually, now you describe the idea, I suppose the BC's Dynamic forms
are close to what you describe -- I haven't attended to them very much
on the grounds that an appropriate storage pool would do the job. It
might for the BCs but it wouldn't do all the extra things you mention!
--
Simon Wright 100% Ada, no bugs.
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 12+ messages in thread
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2003-10-27 16:56 Grace 0.51 released Stephen Leake
2003-10-27 17:07 ` Stephane Richard
2003-10-27 17:18 ` Ed Falis
2003-10-27 17:19 ` Stephane Richard
2003-10-27 17:42 ` Ed Falis
2003-10-28 0:55 ` Robert I. Eachus
2003-10-28 0:17 ` Nick Roberts
2003-10-28 2:10 ` Marin David Condic
2003-10-29 21:16 ` Simon Wright
2003-10-30 22:17 ` Nick Roberts
2003-10-31 7:04 ` Simon Wright
2003-10-30 21:20 ` Russ
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