From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Path: eternal-september.org!reader01.eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!usenet.blueworldhosting.com!feeder01.blueworldhosting.com!peer02.iad.highwinds-media.com!news.highwinds-media.com!feed-me.highwinds-media.com!post02.iad.highwinds-media.com!fx14.iad.POSTED!not-for-mail From: David Thompson Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Ada's ranking of popularity at IEEE Spectrum Organization: Poor Message-ID: References: <72b1318a-2eb6-4129-af9b-5bcfbb329c5b@googlegroups.com> <3dcb7839-3003-4fcd-afb6-3369f715102b@googlegroups.com> X-Newsreader: Forte Agent 3.3/32.846 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Complaints-To: abuse@teranews.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2014 02:01:16 UTC Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2014 22:01:17 -0400 X-Received-Bytes: 2086 X-Received-Body-CRC: 2984509237 Xref: news.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:21270 Date: 2014-07-26T22:01:17-04:00 List-Id: On Tue, 8 Jul 2014 16:03:51 -0700 (PDT), sbelmont700@gmail.com wrote: > On Tuesday, July 8, 2014 1:25:00 PM UTC-4, Shark8 wrote: > Mostly because in a strongly typed system, *everything* has to be a generic. And once you start in with generics, all the little gotchas and quirks make any sort of modestly-complex component next to impossible (or at least extremely unpleasant) to create. So we, as a community, cannot easily divide up the work in a component like manner, and are usually forced to start all way down at the O/S interface level *for every single project*. And again, even if you do manage to create an elegant Ada interface to OpenSSL, it's not going to be OpenSSL, because OpenSSL is an untyped C API that is anathema to everything Ada. The better you make it, the further away from the standard you get, and the less people are going to want to use it. > Huh? Except for application data, which a general-purpose transport can't know about, OpenSSL goes to quite a bit of effort to make its API about as strongly typed as can be accomplished in C, with mostly opaque structs, access routines, shims for ASN.1 and PEM, etc. It's not perfect, and certainly not as easy as in Ada, but it's far from the all-too-common-in-C void* madness you suggest.