Re: Memory Access Question

[trent@unix.SRI.COM (Ray Trent)]

In the above article, hammondr@sunroof.crd.ge.com (richard a hammond) writes:
>In article <18800002@ucf-cs.ucf.edu> tony@ucf-cs.ucf.edu writes:
>>I am looking for a program that tests memory.  Instruction and data space
>>are seperate on my machine and I am trying to test RAM from 0 to n.  I have
>[various other grumbling]
>Ada was designed to write portable, safe software.  Reading/writing
>all locations in memory is possibly portable, but certainly not safe.
>Use the tool suited to the job, assembly language.

Why not just say: No, you can't do it in Ada (easily), nor should you
want to. This is not convincing if a client wants *all* of the code
delivered to be written in Ada (many of them are absolutely stupid
about this). Or perhaps you could just say: check if your
implementation uses integers as pointers and use unchecked conversion
to do pointer arithmetic. 

The answer to the question is: it's implementation dependent whether
you can even do what you want in Ada...if access types are implemented
as integers, you have a pretty good chance of being able to do what
you want via unchecked conversion. If that's unacceptable, then you're
out of luck, use another language.
-- 
"When you're down, it's a long way up
 When you're up, it's a long way down
 It's all the same thing
 And it's no new tale to tell"                      ../ray\..