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From: daveb@ingres.com (When a problem comes along . . . you must whip it)
Newsgroups: comp.os.mach
Subject: Re: Ada Threads?  Any work out there?
Message-ID: <1990Dec18.062202.24384@ingres.Ingres.COM>
Date: 18 Dec 90 06:22:02 GMT
References: <5450.276138f0@zeus.unomaha.edu> <61465@bbn.BBN.COM>
Reply-To: daveb@hydra.Ingres.COM (When a problem comes along . . . you must whip it)
Organization: ASK Computer Systems, Ingres Division
Lines: 54

The Ada community seems to be at war, both internally and externally
over the issue of Posix threads.  One camp says that threads are a bad
idea, and that Ada tasks are the only thing that should exist;
therefore, there should be no binding of Posix threads to Ada.  Other
camps say that Posix threads should/should not be usable as the
implementation model for Ada tasks, making it possible to write a
portable Ada runtime.  The non-Ada camp in Posix would just like to have
a useable C-like standard, and feels greatly frustrated by the divisions
and dissent from the Ada crowd.

So while there may or may not be a Posix threads standard in the next
year or two, don't count on there being an Ada binding or an Ada runtime
written using pthreads.  If you wanted to write an Ada binding, I'm sure
there are people on the pthreads@osf.org mailing list that would be
interested and willing to critique it, if not offer it as a strawman to
the Posix committees for consideration.

cheers,
-dB

In article <61465@bbn.BBN.COM> fkittred@spca.bbn.com (Fletcher Kittredge) writes:
>In article <5450.276138f0@zeus.unomaha.edu> svehla@zeus.unomaha.edu writes:
>>
>>Can anyone tell me if there is any work being done to design and implement an
>>Ada based Threads package similiar to the C threads?  I am considering doing
>>just that and wondered if anyone has already taken the lead.
>
>I strongly suspect that any work you do in this area will be very quickly
>superseded by POSIX 1003.4a.  This standard should provide a language
>independant threads standard for all Unix/Mach implementations.  Ada is
>a specific target language.
>
>A implementation of POSIX 1003.4a-Draft 4 is included with OSF/1, though
>I don't think an Ada binding is.  My guess is that hardware vendors will
>start shipping real OSF/1 around a year from now.  Software developers
>probably should be able to get it in the early spring.
>
>regards,
>fletcher
>
>
>Fletcher E. Kittredge
>Senior Engineer
>Platforms and Tools Group
>BBN Software Products Company
>10 Fawcett St.
>Cambridge, MA. 02138
>617-873-3465
>fkittred@bbn.com  or  fkittred@endor.harvard.edu


--
"If it were easy to understand, we wouldn't call it 'code'"
David Brower: {amdahl, cpsc6a, mtxinu, sun}!rtech!daveb daveb@ingres.com