more silly portablity problems

[arny@cbnewsl.att.com (arny.b.engelson)]

Aside from the Ada portability concerns I'm used to dealing with, such as
Integer and Float type differences, rep specs, etc., I ran into an unexpected
one the other day.

I received something close to 20_000 lines of Ada source code from someone,
which I believe had been compiled under Alsys.  When I attempted to compile
it under DEC's compiler, I discovered (to my disappointment) that the
compiler limits the input line length to 120 characters and the source code
contained many lines (hundreds I think) over this limit.  The compiler
simply ignored everything beyond column 120 (it did print an error message).

I don't mention this to fault the compiler or the source code (although
personally I find line lengths > 80 columns to be most annoying during those
times I am stuck with an 80 column terminal or printer).  This just seemed to
be an interesting portability concern.  Fits in with the maximum length of
identifier names problem which can be much more cumbersome to fix (like after
you globally shorten the name and find out it is now equal to some other name).
The situation was easy to fix (my choice was to write a quick program that
splits the line at the last token prior to column 120), but still something
we should be aware of when writing code, pretty printers not withstanding.

P.S. In case anyone cares, the code was CADRE's Ada binding to their Teamwork/
Access routines. (CADRE Teamwork is a CASE tool, for those unfamiliar with it)

  -- Arny Engelson   att!wayback!arny