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From: mlewis@unocss.unomaha.edu (mlewis)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Meridian/Vax ADA
Keywords: strangenesses
Message-ID: <3244@unocss.unomaha.edu>
Date: 21 Apr 91 17:44:17 GMT
Organization: U. of Nebraska at Omaha
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

I have been working on a project for a little over a year, in a Vax Ada
environment.  As an "expert" in this particular design, I got moved to
another project, using a Mac II and A/UX, that uses a large part of this 
system as it's core.  So for two weeks I have been moving and compiling
code for an Apple. Yech.  Meridian and TeleSoft are the only two compilers
available for this particular combination of hardware and OS, so that's
what I get to use.  Meridian is here, so that's it. We are(I am) upset
that the hundreds of tasks generated by the Vax system are going to 
cause havoc on the A/UX system, because an I/O call blocks. This system
is a communications system, so there are a LOT of I/O calls.  Neither
Meridian nor TeleSoft can deal with this. And jiggering the Unix system
calls to force non-blocking I/O doesn't seem to work.  We will beat this
thing, I 'm not asking for assistance (can't really), but I wanted to 
bitch publicly about Unix implementations of Ada that won't allow porting
of realistic systems to Unix.  The Vax system is within two months of 
formal testing and within six months of delivery, and the code works.

On the thread about Meridian's syntactical faux pas, re constant types,
my experience has been strange.  Vax code that declares a constant:
max_ADT : constant := 64;
that is referenced in another package to define array bounds in another package
type new_array is array (1..max_ADT) of integer;
does not compile on the Meridian compiler. It complains of illegal constraint
values.  Declaring the original constant as an Integer fixes it.  This
seems to me to be different effect of the same phenomenon addressed as an
error in Meridian's syntax analyser?  I have addressed this to project
management as a likely fix to the coding standards, so that we never declare
an anonymous type as a constant.

Please excuse my coding standards in the two lines above. They don't meet
project standards, but this isn't going to a code inspection.  I'm just 
happy to have something to contribute to discussions here that don't respond
to Ted. Thanks.  Comments are welcome, and as I said, we WILL get this thing
fixed.

Marc

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