-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wednesday, March 24, 1999 5:08 AM
Subject: Systems Programming in Ada


>I currently teach in Systems Programming Course for Year 2 Comp Sci
>students (24 lectures and 12 labs).  For historical reasons I use C as
>the programming language.
>
>However in Year 1 the students learn Ada as their first language and
>it would seem more appropriate to use Ada for the course as it would
>free up time currently spent introducing the students to C and in
>particular into the joys of C arrays and pointers.
>
>Does anyone teach such a course and if so what packages do they recommend
>for POSIX compliant (and/or UNIX) systems calls?  Are there any such good
>public-domain  packages for use with gnat (on solaris)?  We might also
>consider using commercial packages if the site-licensing fees were not
>too exhorbitant.
>
You didn't qualify "solaris" sufficiently to give a definitive answer, but here's a start:

The "florist" package avaialable at ftp.cs.fsu.edu in
/pub/PART/FLORIST/florist-3.12w-fsu.tar.gz

Florist is a POSIX Ada binding (1003.5b) specifications and implementation, for use with GNAT.
This is an active project, with new relases appearing from time to time.

I have successfully used an earlier version on Solaris 2.5.1 (sparc), and on SGI IRIX 5.3 - 6.5 and Linux 2.2.3 (glibc6).  However,
not all features are functional -- but the ones I needed were/are.

I am right now trying to compile it on Solaris 5.7 (x86), and have some problems, most likely because this is a fairly new platform.

Of course, your solaris version/hardware combination may be different from the two with which I tried it, but in any case florist is
the best place to start of which I know.