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Date: 30 Jul 93 01:15:46 GMT
From: pipex!warwick!zaphod.crihan.fr!univ-lyon1.fr!scsing.switch.ch!epflnews!di
suns2.epfl.ch!lglsun!madmats@uunet.uu.net  (Mats Weber)
Subject: Re: Forcing default representations
Message-ID: <1993Jul30.030333@lglsun.epfl.ch>
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

In article <9307131922.AA04017@eight-ball.boeing.com>, crispen@eight-ball.boein
g.com (crispen) writes:

|> So basically I'm going after having the best of all possible worlds:
|> we have rep specs (essential, because we're defining objects that are
|> going on a network between two machines of possibly different
|> architectures), but the person who is modifying this file should
|> be able to add or delete from the Aircraft_Trim enumeration at will,
|> and the rep specs are generated automatically.  Cool!

Writing representation specifications for all your types does not help in sendi
ng over a
network, because you still depend on whether your machine is big endian or litt
le
endian. Communicating values between machines with the same endianity will work
, but
will fail if one machine is big endian and the other is little endian.

Ada has no way of specifying exact layout of records: you will never know where
 the
most/least significant bit goes.