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From: "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Standard Ada Preprocessor
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2004 15:04:07 -0600
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Date: 2004-01-27T15:04:07-06:00
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"Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <warren@ve3wwg.tk> wrote in message
news:XdxRb.49218$Kg6.359124@news20.bellglobal.com...
...
> The "Ada phylosophy" works until you start interfacing to many
> foreign components (normally C ones) that cannot be relied upon
> to be the same. You cannot even rely on the same API to be
> available, in some cases. This is where things get real ugly.
>
> The practical side of many bindings, requires me to deal
> with portability issues in a "C wrapper". This may not always
> be entirely possible to avoid because of C macros, but I
> would like to put more code into Ada than into C. But I
> can't, because Ada cannot deal with the portability issues.
> That is, unless I resort to processes outside of the language
> (like gnatprep and code generation).

I've always thought that CM really needs to be applied on a per-line basis.
That is, you should be able to branch individual lines of a source file.
Clearly, such a system must be integrated with an editor, and should be able
to cleanly handle multiple versions of a system.

With such a system, you could cleanly manage any sort of differences without
making the source code harder to read. It's unfortunate that such systems
have never appeared in use.

                       Randy.