[GAP] Ada 2005 API

[John McCormick]

My students equate the material in Ada's annexes with APIs.  The ARM 
is poor at describing the operations.   For example, if you look at 
section A.4.5 of the ARM to learn about the operations available for 
unbounded-length strings, you find a package specification with NO 
documentation within it.  (My students point to this lack of 
documentation as a model for not documenting their own package 
specifications.)  Now there is a very brief section after the 
unbounded-length string package specification, but you have to go to 
A.4.3 to find the definitions of equivalent fixed-length string 
operations in order to understand the unbounded-length 
operations.  My students compare this organization to the Java API 
documentation and rightfully claim that it is far easier to figure 
out Java strings than Ada's.  So I would love to see a friendlier 
description of the annexes than that is in the ARM.  One that is 
closer to the online Java API.

John

At 12:36 PM 2/21/2008 -0500, you wrote:

>On Feb 21, 2008, at 12:02 PM, Edward G. Okie wrote:
>
> > Does anyone know of an Ada API specification anywhere on the web?
> >
> > My students who are learning Ada frequently ask me whether there is an
> > Ada API specification available on the web.  When they learned Java,
> > they typically relied heavily on the online Java API, and as they are
>
>This may be the problem.  The core of the language is quite
>independent of API's.  The type model, the control structures,
>subprograms and parameter passing,  genericity, concurrency, etc. do
>not need any API's to be understood.  If your students are looking
>for other interfaces when the core of the language provides
>everything they need, they are  looking in the wrong place.  This
>means that the motivation must be other than to write web
>applications, of course.
>
> > learning Ada they are a bit frustrated to not have a similar
> > reference.
> > There is a version for Ada 95 available on the AdaBrowse site, but I
> > don't know of anything similar for Ada 05.  The Ada Reference Manual
> > does provide similar information, but they want something closer to
> > the
> > Java API.
> >
>
>Ed Schonberg
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John W. McCormick                mccormick at cs.uni.edu
Computer Science Department
University of Northern Iowa        voice (319) 273-6056
Cedar Falls, IA 50614-0507       fax (319) 273-7123
http://www.cs.uni.edu/~mccormic/