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From: "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Standard Ada Preprocessor
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2004 14:42:09 -0600
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Date: 2004-01-27T14:42:09-06:00
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"Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <warren@ve3wwg.tk> wrote in message
news:ZwxRb.49242$Kg6.360396@news20.bellglobal.com...
...
> I hate this. Conditional compilation would be a better
> solution for the developer because it is less error prone,
> and it is more natural.

I couldn't disagree. Now, try to figure out a natural way to express such
conditional compilation in Ada. I can't (and I've tried to solve this
problem for 20 years.) If you don't have a non-ugly way to solve the
problem, the chances of anything being done about it are zero.

There have been similar issues with similar resolutions in the history of
Ada. For instance, you'd can't usefully redefine "*" and "/" on fixed point
types in Ada 95. The problem is well known, but without a solution, it was
never fixed in Ada 95. Tucker recently proposed a solution that appears to
work, so we'll probably fix this in Ada 200Y.

But without a workable solution, there can be no new feature. (And, because
not everyone finds this necessary, the solution needs to be clean and
well-integrated into the rest of the language.)

                    Randy.