Re: Standard Ada Preprocessor

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Marin David Condic" <nobody@noplace.com> wrote in message
news:401272E3.4040506@noplace.com...
...
> Oh sure. They are better than a sharp stick in the eye and if you have
> to  control representation, they're an elegant solution. But they are
> still "Butt Ugly" in the sense that the instant you use one, you can't
> promise that the code will work *anywhere* except on the one
> compiler/target where you built it.

There is hardly any (useful) code that will work *anywhere*. Most existing
free Ada code won't run on Janus/Ada out of the box because Integer is
16-bit -- and thus a lot of operations overflow. (Of course, there's no
problem with proper type declarations, but those are rare.) And a lot of
code is dependent in some way on the target - for GUI or output devices or
whatever. Certainly adding a rep. clause has little effect on that.
Especially if your world view pretty much starts and ends with PC hardware
(as mine does practically).

We build Claw from the ground up with the intent of making it portable to
every Windows compiler -- yet there a quite a few differences that we have
to deal with. So rep. clauses don't bother me; it is extremely rare that
they would make code less portable than it already is.

> As for submitting something to the ARG? I'll leave that to the language
> lawyers. They'll come up with far better proposals than I could ever
> write - so long as they think the idea might be a good one.

The language lawyers are unlikely to even pay any attention to it unless you
submit a worked out change request. We have enough such requests that we
certainly aren't looking for more!

I view this is list pretty much as what Robert Dewar called a "chat list" -
a place where people gripe a lot, turn molehills into mountains (and vice
versa), and you can't gauge much of anything by the conversations here. I
read this list mainly as part of my work for one of my other hats (webmaster
at adaic.org) -- I'm trolling for newsworthy items. There have been
occassional ideas where I got excited enough to propose something to the ARG
("private with" is the one that comes to mind), but these days I feel
swamped enough that it would have to be a stupendous idea before I'd make
more work for myself.

So, if you want something done, you need to take action to make a proposal
on Ada-Comment. It certainly doesn't need to be perfect - and even if it is,
the ARG would change it all around before standardizing it - but if no one
asks, it's very unlikely that the topic would even come up. Griping here may
feel good, but it has virtually no impact on the future of Ada.

                          Randy.



 I'm just the
> end-user of Ada - a customer - expressing what he thinks would make the
> language more usable on a day-to-day level. We're a dwindling herd, so
> maybe those opinions ought to get some attention by the people who make
> and sell Ada. Hope springs eternal! :-)