From:  Randy Brukardt <[log in to unmask]>

> > I am hoping someone can tell me I am wrong, and will point to some vendor
> > who supports a tool such as this (hosted on Linux, Solaris, or Windows
> NT).
>
> RRS had considered building such a tool commercially early on during the
> development of Ada 9x (possibly as part of the development of what became
> Claw). But the existence of c2ada made it likely that such a tool would not
> produce a lot of revenue, and we decided it we didn't need it for Claw. So
> we didn't do it.
>
> The thin bindings created by something like C2Ada don't buy you much anyway:
> they're at least as hard to use as the C code, impossible to debug
> (especially when something caused a mismatch of parameters), and don't do
> much to show off the advantages of programming in Ada. Programming with them
> is like writing C in Ada syntax. To make them usable, you have to wrap them
> in a real Ada package - but then you might as well have built the whole
> thing by hand. Which is why we built Claw...
>
>                                         Randy.

Right.  The only purpose for a thin binding is to build a thick binding
on top of it.  ;-)

The value of c2ada and similar tools is to help automate generation of
the thin binding.


--

Mark Lundquist
Senior Software Engineer
Rational Software
Development Solutions Business Unit
UNIX Suites Group
Aloha, OR, USA