Ada library for RISC OS

This library is some kind of a stop-gap solution for Ada programming on RISC OS until the Ada class library is ready.

The history of this library is a little bit strange. In 1997, Robin Watts of Warm Silence Software convinced me that CDBurn should be released as a commercial product. I immediately decided that this would be a good time to implement my first Ada 95 RISC OS application ;-)

Until then, nobody ever wrote a WIMP application in Ada before, so there were no libraries available. So I started to implement my own, very procedurally structured library which looked a lot like my BBC BASIC library...mainly because there was not enough time to do a new design, and partly because CDBurn was not intended to be implemented in an OO way. I had not enough experience with the Ada 95 OO features to go the whole hog, and I wanted to reuse some parts of the CDBurn prototype, which was written in BASIC.

The library now contains quite a range of features, so it is possible to implement a complete WIMP application in Ada 95 without too much problems. Some features are actually implemented in a way I would like to see them in the new Ada class library approach (e.g. the menu handling).

If anybody wants to see what the library is like, you can download the complete sources.

To be able to advocate Ada usage more convincingly, but also to improve maintenance and further development of CDBurn, a project was started (together with Christoph Schemainda and Stefan Bellon) to do a new object-oriented class library for WIMP programming in Ada 95 on RISC OS. An overview is available here.