Re: Ada Decimal Arithmetic & Representations (ADAR) V1.0 available

[mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)]

In article <1993Mar19.161646.26563@sei.cmu.edu> adainfo@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu (Michele L. Kee (AdaIC)) writes:
>
>The ADAR packages were developed to provide a common approach for
>decimal arithmetic and Ada 83.  The ADAR package set consists of two
>related facilities for decimal arithmetic, one based on discriminant
>records, and the other on generics, to provide decimal computation and
>interoperable representations of decimal quantities.
>
>The ADAR packages include support for decimal data with up to 18
>digits of precision, arithmetic operations with programmer control
>over rounding versus truncation, conversions to and from common
>external representations, and formatted output of decimal values based
>on COBOL's "picture" clauses.
>
I have been working with ADAR off and on for a month or so, and find it
an extraordinarily interesting artifact for educational purposes because
there is some very good Ada in it. I believe that it is also useful in
its own right as a facility for adding IS features to Ada83. You can view it
as a preview of some of the IS facilities in Ada9X.

Ben Brosgol, Dave Emery, and Bob Eachus have done a great job of producing
this software and deserve our commendation. That said, I wish to express
some disappointment at the limited number of compilers for which ADAR
has been tested. The Meridian family is the most common family of compilers
in education, and ADAR dos not (yet) work under Meridian; preliminary
tests indicate that at least some compilation-order problems will need to
be resolved. 

To operate under Ada/Ed, ADAR will need a good bit more work; there are
(I think) some capacity problems as well as the Ada/Ed requirement (which
used to be common in Ada compilers) that a generic body appear in the
same file as the associated generic spec.

Perhaps we at GW will find the time to re-work ADAR for these two
important education-oriented Ada systems; perhaps someone in net-land
will. Whatever, I commend ADAR to you as a neat bunch of stuff.

Mike Feldman
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Michael B. Feldman
co-chair, SIGAda Education Committee

Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
School of Engineering and Applied Science
The George Washington University
Washington, DC 20052 USA
(202) 994-5253 (voice)
(202) 994-5296 (fax)
mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Internet)

"The most important thing is to be sincere, 
and once you've learned how to fake that, you've got it made." 
-- old show-business adage
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