Yesterday I posted an announcement (the first such announcement) to comp.lang.ada about the official availability of the Ada bindings to PLplot. Not too surprisingly (to me), the first response was a request to have the "thick" Ada examples displayed on the PLplot home page rather than the "traditional" examples. The comp.lang.ada poster states, in part,
"I noticed that all examples mirror the fortranesque C library functions more or less directly. (6char names with a "pl" prefix making them 8char, tons of numeric parameters...." I realize that this might be a sensitive subject, so I tread softly. I concur with the comp.lang.ada poster but have deferred requesting that the thick bindings be displayed out of respect for the PLplot tradition. However, I developed the "thick" binding originally and added the "traditional" binding at the request of our group of developers. In so doing, I have maintained both bindings as co- equals. Only a few days ago, Alan added the thick binding examples to the test suite and they passed at the same level as the traditional binding. As a still-new Ada programmer (at least compared to some of the gurus on ada.comp.lang), I have detected that writing code with clarity is a mantra in the Ada community which is the reason that the poster has made his request. As far as documentation is concerned, the thick binding has comments which are rigorously keyed to the traditional PLplot names, making the look-up of names in the documentation very easy. I would love to be able to respond to the poster with good news while this topic is still current on comp.lang.ada. To my mind, presenting potential Ada users of PLplot with a good first experience is more important and more likely to create a new PLplot user than presenting a consistent style on the PLplot home page--Ada users will likely not even look at the other code examples, and if they do, will immediately recognize the difference for what it is. Jerry ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
