Some time back, Alan suggested that I make what amounts to a new,
third, Ada binding, and I agree that this is a good idea.
Of the two Ada bindings which I have called thick and thin, the
thin binding adheres to the C API of PLplot, using the same
subroutine names, argument lists, and data structures including type
names.
The thick binding differs in several ways. The subroutine names have
been changed to be more pleasing to programmers from the Ada culture,
the data structures have been changed to be more Ada-like thus
requiring a shorter learning curve, argument lists have been modified
by removing array dimensions since Ada has true arrays which include
their beginning and ending indices and thus their sizes, many
constants (mostly integer) have been given names (e.g. one can use
Red instead of 1 but 1 still works--see xt12a.adb), and a
number of high-level easy-plotters have been included which in part
exploit Ada's ability to have variable argument lists and which take
care of much of the PLplot set-up (look in the early parts of
plplot.ads).
Because of the new subroutine names in the thick binding, some
programmers may find it annoying to deal with two names for each
subroutine when using the documentation and this is the crux of
Alan's suggestion, which was to make what amounts to a new thick
binding but which uses the traditional PLplot subroutine names.
I'm willing to make a version of the thick binding that substitutes
the traditional PLplot subroutine names for the names that I used in
the thick Ada binding for those Ada programmers who find it more
convenient to look up things in the PLplot documents that way, but
note that:
(a) I have carefully kept the traditional subroutine names in a
comment immediately before the new names in the thick binding,
plplot.ads (specification) files as well as the plplot.adb (body)
files specifically for ease of looking up function names. I use them
all the time and it's not that big of a deal.
(b) I doubt that there will be many Ada programmers using the thin
interface. Consequently, I feel that the examples should use only the
data structures from the thick interface, because those are the data
structures that Ada programmers will be using in their coding.
To summarize: The plan is to make a quasi-third Ada binding which is
exactly like the current thick binding except that the subroutine
names are the traditional PLplot names. There will be two example
files for each example, one written to the thick binding and one
written to the new binding. The naming conventions are e.g. for
Example 1, xt01a.adb is written for the thick binding and x01a.adb is
written to the new binding.
Coding for the Ada examples should use Ada constructs and functions
as needed. (See the other note from me today relating to the sprintf
problem from a few days ago.)
Once an example is complete for one binding, the corresponding
example can be automatically generated by a series of string
substitutions for subroutine names on the source--that's how I plan
to generate the new binding as well.
Jerry
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