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From: cjrgreen@concentric.net (Christopher Green)
Subject: Re: Alternate to Unchecked_Conversion - Portable?
Date: 1999/02/25
Message-ID: <36d65c7c.15971534@nntp.concentric.net>#1/1
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References: <36d05e39.0@news.pacifier.com>
 <36d2638e.6427631@nntp.concentric.net> <7avpi0$jke$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>
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Organization: Concentric Internet Services
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1999-02-25T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

On Thu, 25 Feb 1999 19:52:42 GMT, dennison@telepath.com wrote:

>In article <7b3glh$ml6$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>,
>  robert_dewar@my-dejanews.com wrote:
>
>> A mantra that should be central to every programmer's
>> view of the universe is:
>>
>>   "just because it works does not mean it is right"
>>
>> A lot of programmers violate this because they don't know
>> enough to avoid violations.
>
>I hope you try to ingrain this in your students, because I run into a
>depressing number of programmers who hold the opposite view. One gentleman in
>particular was of the view that putting any extra effort into quality above
>what is required to get the program to operate is tantamount to theft on the
>programmers part.
>
>Luckily, such folk tend to *hate* Ada, so I don't have to work with too many
>of them. :-)
>
>T.E.D.

"Just because it is right does not mean it works".

Code that must, as a matter of functional requirement, implement
interfaces between Ada and constructs that are native in other
languages, tends to expose any number of compiler misfeatures.

Maybe the Unchecked_Conversion of access types has
wider approval from those who develop language standards.
But I cannot afford to spend more time than I have to in
troubleshooting code that fails to port to a new compiler.
In the products I deal with regularly, address representation
clauses are the cause of no more portability problems than are
uses of Unchecked_Conversion.  This includes products in
which Ada 83 and Ada 95 must be supported from the same
source code base.

-- 
Christopher Green
Advanced Technology Center
Laguna Hills, California