Ada (was Re: Columbia)

From: Zane H. Healy <healyzh_at_aracnet.com>
Date: Sun Feb 2 10:48:01 2003

On 2003.02.02 02:43 Adrian Vickers wrote:
> At 00:24 02/02/2003, you wrote:
> >Unless you're using platform specific code, Ada is *very*
> >transportable.
>
> The trouble being, of course, that almost everything *is* platform
> specific. That's not a criticism of Ada per se; most "portable" code
> suffers on different platforms, especially when windowing environments
> are
> in use. Mind you, when Linux and X become the defacto industry
> standard
> which every machine runs, portability issues will be largely a thing
> of the
> past... I hope.

There is apparently a cross-platform GUI toolkit now based, I believe
on GTK. I've not tried it yet, as I'm not to the point I'm ready to
mess with GUI's with Ada (I've only done GUI programming on the Mac).

BTW, Linux is good for some things, but in a lot of ways, it's not much
better than MS Windows (though as I type this I am burning a set of
Red Hat CD's). Personally I think the best use for Linux is cheap
semi-intelligent desktop terminals.

> >One thing about Ada that I found rather interesting was mention of an
> >OS written in Great Britain in the early 80's. It was written in Ada
> >and ran on the PDP-11.
>
> An OS written in Ada? Any idea what it was called?

PULSE. The development was apparently done on the VAX, and
cross-compiled for the PDP-11/23. The book in question is "PULSE: An
Ada-based Distributed Operating System".

                        Zane
Received on Sun Feb 02 2003 - 10:48:01 GMT