Repository of useful software components

Email: dale@rmit.edu.au

For several years I have been teaching 1st year students how to program in Ada. Over the years I have written numerous little packages that have proved their worth. Thought I had better share them with you!

All are released into the public domain, except Ada.Text_IO visualisation tool (GPL), and the Simple Prolog Interpreter, which is a derived work from Stanford. It retains whatever rights they require.

String processing

Family of packages (a rather nuclear family :-).

   Strings                 empty package
      Fields               selecting fields in strings (AWK like)
      IO                   padded Put routines

HTML output routines

(Requires the Ada CGI package)
HTML I/O routines

   HTML             HTML.* implement simple procedures to output HTML strings
     Forms
     Frames
     Headings
     Input
     Lists
     Tables
     Texts
   One_Of_Many      Translation from radio buttons to enumerated types
   Many_Of_Many     Translation from check boxes to boolean arrays, indexed by an enumerated type

Ada.Text_IO visualisation tool

io_view demonstrates how Ada's input model works when reading from a standard text file. Allows you to view the effect of reading

   integers
   floats
   characters
   strings (using get)
   strings (using get_line)
   skip_line

Displays file pointer, EOL, EOF status, and allows multi level undo.

Forms based programming

forms sits on top of curses, and allows you to create forms with input fields. Users can move around fields, enter, update etc. Each form can have validation performed as values are typed in. Very un-OO, but reasonably flexible.

Simple Unix interface

Unix packages make no attempt at Posix compliance. Rather they try as closely as possible to fit in into what has been an Ada hostile work environment, and so look as much as they can as the original Unix/C versions.
A small subset of routines written with various degrees of quality as I learnt how to talk C.

Simple Prolog interpreter

This prolog interpreter is an Ada95 revision of the Prolog interpreter included with the Anna toolset (an annotation language for Ada, developed at Stanford). All routines can be called from an Ada program, allowing a Prolog backend with an Ada frontend.

Not a full Prolog implementation by any means, it still provides enough expressiveness to make some programming jobs simpler. Very useful way of introducing the concept of declarative programming within the context of normal problem solving (something that some Prolog subjects seem to miss out on).

Making Motif/Callbacks easier

This callback package provides a convenient way to create types that can be passed via callbacks. It consists of a simple package spec, and an extensive discussion of how to use it.

Data compression

A package written by one of my students which implements huffman encoding very well.