From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.5-pre1 (2020-06-20) on ip-172-31-74-118.ec2.internal X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.5-pre1 Date: 7 Apr 93 12:55:59 GMT From: agate!howland.reston.ans.net!noc.near.net!inmet!spock!stt@ucbvax.Berkeley .EDU (Tucker Taft) Subject: Re: Ceiling function in Ada Message-ID: <1993Apr7.125559.14995@inmet.camb.inmet.com> List-Id: In article karen@lobo.canberra.edu.au (Karen George) writes: >On the other hand, why wouldn't a high level language provide a >function as basic as truncate. This is an easy task at machine level, >and is not an uncommon task. . . . In hindsight, it was a mistake in Ada 83 not to define a standard package for support of floating point operations such as truncate, ceiling, etc., as well as the elementary functions. At the time it was felt that there was not a great need to standardize a lot of packages. In more recent years, language standards have devoted more and more "real estate" to standard libraries. In ANSI C, the standard libraries are about half the standard. In Common Lisp, of course, the standard libraries are most of the standard (since there is almost no syntax to speak of). For Ada 9X, we have realized that standard packages can be just as important as some bit of syntax, and a full set of primitive and elementary functions for floating point types will be provided, including Truncation, Ceiling, Floor, Rounding, Sin, Cos, ... Hopefully this will avoid some of the wheel reinvention that took place with Ada 83, and also encourage implementations to map such standard operations directly to the appropriate hardware instructions. In the meantime, there is a standard set of Generic Primitive Functions that has been defined for Ada 83, and is progressing through the ISO standardization process by itself. Some vendors should be supporting it already. >Karen George Email: karen@lobo.canberra.edu.au >Information Sciences and Engineering Phone: +61 6 201 2430 >University of Canberra, AUSTRALIA FAX: +61 6 201 5227 S. Tucker Taft stt@inmet.com Ada 9X Mapping/Revision Team Intermetrics, Inc. Cambridge, MA 02138