Re: win32ada design question/problem

[Mats Weber <Mats.Weber@elca-matrix.ch>]

Tom Moran wrote:

>   Why exactly is X'Address preferable to X'Unchecked_Access?
>   Having spent a fair amount of time in the past debugging/correcting
> supposedly portable code that incorrectly assumed an access type was a
> 'Address, I'm rather sensitive to this issue.

Other reasons:

- It's the good old Ada 83 way that has worked for 15 years now, wo why
change ?

- Try interfacing fcntl, setsockopt or some other weird functions using
access types: these somtimes return, or take as a parameter, a pointer
that points to a type that changes depending on the function you want to
perform, which is determined by the value of another parameter. You can
certainly do this with overloading, but I am not sure this buys much in
a thin binding.

Also, using 'Address properly does _not_ imply converting System.Address
to/from access types, which is a bad idea IMO.