std-unix@longway.TIC.COM (Moderator, John S. Quarterman) (08/24/89)
An Update on UNIX* and C Standards Activities August 1989 Jeffrey S. Haemer, Report Editor USENIX Standards Watchdog Committee IEEE 1003.5 Ada Language Update Ted Baker (tbaker@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu) reports of the April 1989 meeting: The Minneapolis meeting started off poorly. The chairman, co- chairman, and technical editor were absent, though each for good reasons. ("Co-chairman" is POSIX for vice-chairman.) Only one of the members present had received a copy of the latest draft (2.0). Many of the changes agreed upon at the last meeting (Fort Lauderdale) were not yet reflected in this draft. There was no agenda. Despite these handicaps, the group made considerable progress. Steve Deller acted as chair, working up an agenda and holding the group fairly closely to it. (Indeed, Steve Deller has now become an official co-chair, but is still doing a good job.) By the second day copies of Draft 2.0 had been made. This draft was reviewed completely, and several changes were approved. The hottest issue was how signals would be mapped to Ada task entries. Several semantic gaps in the P1003.1 C-language binding were discovered, and passed on to the P1003.1 working group. Most major semantic issues were, at this point, resolved. 1. Each Ada program consists of a single POSIX process, or at least appears to be so through the POSIX/Ada interface. 2. POSIX signals are handled by Ada tasks via the same mechanism as hardware interrupts, as logical entry calls. 3. POSIX character and string types are distinct from the standard Ada character and string types. 4. The C-binding's "errno" values are translated into distinct Ada exceptions. __________ * UNIX is a registered trademark of AT&T in the U.S. and other countries. Jeffrey S. Haemer, Editor USENIX Standards Watchdog Committee August 1989 Standards Update - 2 - IEEE 1003.5 Ada Language 5. The Ada-binding need not follow the organizational and naming conventions of the C-binding, especially where they violate principles of data abstraction. What remains is filling in a lot of details, including most of the text of the document, and making it stylistically consistent. Group members volunteered to edit the agreed-upon changes into the draft document, while filling in missing text. This work was to be completed before May 10-12, at which time a subset of the working group would meet in Bedford Mass. for a "writing party". The goal of this party would be to catch up, completing all missing portions of the draft, so that it could be submitted for mock ballot before the July P1003 meeting. There was some question whether this goal would be met. (The mock ballot date was missed, so it appears 1003.5 won't have an official Ada language binding that corresponds to 1003.1 by end-of-year 1989.) There were also coordination meetings (BOFs) with the groups working on language-independent specifications (P1003.1) and threads (P1003.4). The Ada group seemed generally pleased with progress on the language-independent specification, and hopes that the draft Ada- binding will provide some guidance to that activity. The group is less pleased with the tendency of other groups (e.g. P1003.2 and P1003.4) to aggravate the problem of C-dependencies in their draft documents. The Ada group is very interested in having the 1003.4 standard include multi-threaded processes, but is very concerned that any such standard be compatible with the semantics of Ada tasks. Some of the preliminary proposals coming out of the threads working group do not seem to be compatible with this goal. Jeffrey S. Haemer, Editor USENIX Standards Watchdog Committee