Re: How to Make Ada more widely used?

[cis.ohio-state.edu!magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!howland.]

Some background:

I've been "into" Ada technology since 1985. I have managed large
Ada projects. I have developed a large amount of Ada software. I
believe in the "rightness" of Ada.

IMHO:

One of the biggest problems encountered while trying to use Ada
for something other than the "large" developments is the lack of
readily available interfaces to the kind of things you need for
writing programs: portable, standard interfaces to the underlying
operating system.

As an example, how do you deal with directories in Ada? Easy to do
in C. Good "standard" libraries.

How do you deal with string parsing in Ada? Easy to do in C. Good
"standard" libraries.

How do you get command line arguments in Ada?  Easy to do in C.
It's part of the language.

And on and on and on..........

I develop Ada software for a living. I like the language. I would
prefer to use it all the time. But when I need a quick-and-dirty
that I can't do in a shell script or sed or something, I will turn
to C. (Yech! There, I said it. Pooey! 8-{)

The answer as I see it is the POSIX Ada bindings. I am using them
at work, but the "designers" who read through the POSIX specs and
decided what was "required" unfortunately knew (know?) nothing
about Ada. And the bindings we have been given have left out the
most rudimentary elements: e.g., the generic read/write procedures
in the I/O spec!

What I want is for the Ada vendors to bundle a FULL POSIX 1003.5
library with the compiler. And when it is available, a .20 library,
too! THAT will make Ada easier to use and will remove many of the
arguments that allow the old guard to stay in their C ways.

Regards,

Bill Lee