Re: fixed point vs floating point

[Ken Garlington <kennieg@nospam.flash.net>]

Joe Gwinn wrote:
> 
> Portability is less important than workability.  And, we were always assured that use
> of Ada guaranteed portability.  Apparently that was a lie; we also need to
> be Ada experts to achieve portability?  Just like all other languages?

In my experience - absolutely. If you assume that X is portable just
because it
happens to work when processed with a particular vendor's implementation
of X,
you are probably going to be disappointed.

(Just to save you grief in the future, feel free to plug in any of the
following for
X: Ada, C++, Java, POSIX, CORBA, etc.)

> Well, you are obsessing on the fact that I don't recall ten years later
> all the details of how to do fixed point arithmetic in Ada83, which we
> never used except to test.  And, you are proving my basic point, that with
> all that user-supplied information, Ada83 should be able to handle fixed
> point arithmetic.  This is just some added information, clearly not
> absolutely required information, because Ada95 no longer always requires
> it.

Ada no longer requires it for trivial cases. For many intermediate
calculations
of this type, you still have to explicitly specify the resulting type.

> And, I really don't see why it's necessary to deny the failings of
> compilers that have been obsolete for at least a decade, for a now
> superceeded language.  Surely we can find something more current and
> relevant to worry about, to argue about.

I'm confused. If the behavior you described is not relavant, why did you
bring it up?