Re: Question of Visibility

[rational.com!geneo@uunet.uu.net (Gene Ouye)]

Wes Groleau X7574 (groleau@e7sa.crd.ge.com) wrote:
: In all the discussion on "hiding" STANDARD.BOOLEAN with a different bit
: pattern, I have yet to see two issues addressed:

: 1. I would expect STANDARD.BOOLEAN in any implementation to match the interna
l
: hardware's conditional instructions.

: 2. IF one somehow succeeded in hiding STANDARD.BOOLEAN, wouldn't the compiler
: generate the same code as before for  if  statements?

: Wes Groleau

Wes, I tried to email this to you, but it bounced back:

FYI:
On Friday I sent an email to Boris (couldn't post it because our news was
acting up) that mentioned the following:

o "Use"-ing a Boolean_Types_Pkg would not redefine the predefined operators
  that return Standard.Boolean.  This means that the code will have to change.
  If nothing else, there will have to be explicit conversions between the
  Boolean_Type_Pkg.Boolean and Standard.Boolean before/after every call to
  the FORTRAN library that expects/returns boolean values.

o If the code has to change, IMHO it would be best to place a skin over the
  pragma Interface to the FORTRAN library that would do the conversion between
  the Ada and the FORTRAN perceptions of Boolean.  That would hide the FORTRAN
  specifics at an appropriate level, and would not make the entire Ada
  application dependent on FORTRAN's representation of a Boolean.

Gene Ouye (geneo@rational.com)