Re: Please list all the Ada libraries you know

[Adam Beneschan <adam@irvine.com>]

On Tuesday, March 5, 2013 10:15:56 PM UTC-8, J-P. Rosen wrote:
> Le 04/03/2013 21:43, Adam Beneschan a écrit :
> 
> > Well, no, you don't "need" one.  Once you know what directory you're
> > looking in, it's not all that difficult to look for any file whose
> > name matches what you're looking for without regard to letter case.
> 
> Sure. But that means doing a full directory search any time you refer to
> a unit (just to check if by chance there is another file with the same
> name and different casing) => a lot of disk access, and considering the
> ratio of disk speed to memory speed nowadays, this is likely to have a
> very sensible effect on speed for a very minor (IMHO) nuisance.

If you're trying to say "big enough that one can sense it", "sensible" isn't the right word--it means something totally different.  "Noticeable" is probably the word you wanted.

Anyway, though, my feeling is that once one has chosen to build a "source model" compiler--which means, if I understand it correctly, that if you WITH a package then the compiler has to read the original source of the WITH'ed package specification--then one has already decided that disk access time isn't an issue.  (If it were, the compiler could do something to create a smaller, compressed version of the specification that it would read in instead of reading the original source.)  So whatever good reasons there might be for GNAT to default to a particular case convention, saving disk read time probably isn't a valid reason.

                            -- Adam