X11Ada

X11Ada is an Ada 95 binding to X11R5, to the Xlib, Xt, and Motif programming API's. It is a direct binding. The Ada 95 features it uses heavily are general access types and child packages, but there are no tagged types. The mapping is direct in the sense that there is mostly a 1-1 mapping between:

C header file
Ada package
C type
Ada type
C function
Ada function or procedure
C variable or constant
Ada variable or constant

Downloading

Extracting and building X11Ada takes about 20 megabytes of disk space. Building the software takes around an hour on a Sun-4.

In this release, the X11 and Xt components are available directly on the Web from two sites:

The Motif component is available from here.

Building the installation

The software is in tar, gzip format. To extract it: If you also want the Motif component, Then to build the binding on Sun-4, type: To build it on another platform, see the section Building X11Ada on other platforms below.

Latest changes

  • X11Ada works with GNAT 3.01 on Sun-4.
  • The documentation files are now available in Microsoft Word (*.doc) format and Postscript format (*.ps).
  • The MRM functions are added to the Motif binding.
  • The Stdarg package has been ported to Sparc, Intel, HP, MIPS, PowerPC, and Alpha.
  • The copyright notices have been revised.

    • Online files

    The "doc" directory contains online documentation files.

    The "ada" directory contains source files for X11Ada.

    The "c" directory contains the C header files from which the Ada was derived. These could be needed because the tool we used to translate the C headers to Ada left out the comments. If you want to take a look at the original comments that were in the C headers, the Ada files contain references like:

    PointerMotionHintMask : constant := 128; -- X.h:108

    which says that this Ada declaration corresponds to line 108 of the C header file X.h.

    The "test" directory contains a few small test programs.

    Documentation

    The documentation files in the "doc" directory are:

    x11ada.html
    this file
    roadmap
    a map of the correspondence between Ada package names, Ada source files, and C header files
    xbind.*
    xbind.ps is the Postscript version of a technical report and overview of X11Ada; xbind.doc is the Microsoft Word version.
    interf4.*
    interf4.ps is the Postscript version of a paper about a Windows NT binding that was recently completed. The sections of the paper about variable-length argument lists and variable-length arrays are also relevant to the X binding. (Also, the section on treatment of C unions should be relevant, except the support for pragma Unchecked_Union is not yet implemented in GNAT 3.01 on Sparc.) Interf4.doc is the Microsoft Word version. This paper was published in the 1995 TriAda conference proceedings.
    stdarg.*
    stdarg.ps is the Postscript version of a paper about the Stdarg package of X11Ada; stdarg.doc is the Microsoft Word version.

    Building X11Ada on other platforms

    This release of X11Ada has been tested with GNAT 3.01 on Sun-4. The Stdarg family of packages are known to be machine-dependent. Versions are provided for the

    machine architectures. Here is how to build it for one of these platforms:

    In the "test" directory, the "testvar" program tests that the Stdarg mechanism is working, and has been built correctly for the current machine platform.

    As new releases of GNAT come out, and other Ada 95 compilers become available, small changes to X11Ada may be needed.

    Test programs

    Currently there are 5 small test programs:

    The last three are translated from examples in the O'Reilly X programming manuals. Here is what these three are supposed to look like when run: basicwin, xrowcolumn, and hello_motif. There may be slight differences on your system.

    NOTE: These bindings are no longer actively supported by AverStar

    These bindings are no longer actively supported by AverStar. However, they are in use throughout the Ada community, so you should be able to get help by posting questions to the newsgroup comp.lang.ada.

    Also, there is a set of slightly updated sources (to make them compilable on the latest GNAT) and Linux binaries on the AdaPower site at:

    If you have trouble downloading any of these files, please contact:

    S. Tucker Taft
    AverStar
    23 Fourth Avenue
    Burlington, MA, 01803, USA
    stt@averstar.com (email)
    781-221-6990 (voice)
    781-221-6991 (Fax)

    X11Ada programming examples

    For information on X11Ada programming see The Free X11/Ada 95 Programmer's Home Page as well as the AdaPower web page mentioned above, http://www.adapower.com/lab/adax.html.

    Some programs have been contributed by users of the binding, see the contributions directory.

    Changes

    Updates to this file:

    July 28, 1999 -- added direct link to Motif binding.

    May 1999 -- changed references to "stt" from "mg".

    March 8, 1996 -- described last software update.

    Software updates:

    March 4, 1996: upgrade to GNAT 3.03.

    Feb 29, 1996: various small bug fixes. Add null_widget and other declarations for private types. Move Resource to package X.Tasking so the binding can be used on machines where tasking is not supported. Added contributions directory and Mandelbrot program. Fix AdaMagic compilation errors.

    Dec 19, 1995: release that changes access subprograms to all have pragma Convention (C), and other small changes to make the binding work with the OCS compiler.