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