Re: Newbie question : types , representation

[Jos De Laender <De_Laender-De_Winter@village.uunet.be>]

Matthew Heaney wrote:
> 
> In article <7ptsgn$nvp$1@nnrp1.deja.com> , jdla@my-deja.com  wrote:
> 
> > But I didn't see however too much of practical answers how to do, in a ADA way
> > and without spoiling to much processor cycles in converting hence and back.
> 
> What makes you think that the "Ada way" is more expensive wrt processor
> cycles?  How do you know that Ada isn't faster than C?

I didn't claim that ! I'm not starting one of those stupid 'this
language is better wars'. I'm just asking how I can express the problem
equally elegant/fast in ADA.

What I do know that in C, I can do all of my operations (shifting,
anding ..) on chars.
It's ugly in the sense that I'm mixing really semantics of chars and
bytes and integers and whatever. But on compiler output I can expect a
fairly optimal implementation.

In ADA , I think (but this was part of the question) , I have to go
through some tables and through some conversion functions. Although it
is not necessarily so , there is at least the increased risk of less
optimal implementation, because the compiler has to find out those
things. I didn't say this is not possible, I asked how one could write
it without having this risk.

Best regards,

Jos De Laender