From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,c7ea1cb7a2beb2ee X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: "Robert I. Eachus" Subject: Re: Disallowing Pre-Defined Operations Date: 2000/04/06 Message-ID: <38EBDD10.65444727@earthlink.net>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 607323967 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <8a9eeg$qtv$1@newpoisson.nosc.mil> <38D2E598.262D1CD5@erols.com> <8b0pbg$aph$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <38D9A2E8.F720768@erols.com> <8bcalg$pmb$1@nnrp1.deja.com> X-Accept-Language: en,pdf Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Complaints-To: abuse@earthlink.net X-Trace: newsread2.prod.itd.earthlink.net 954981535 63.24.56.57 (Wed, 05 Apr 2000 17:38:55 PDT) Organization: The MITRE Corporation MIME-Version: 1.0 NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 05 Apr 2000 17:38:55 PDT Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 2000-04-06T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Robert Dewar wrote: > I see a lot of people hypothesizing that this would be a useful > feature that would sell Ada, but as we all know in CLA, there > is that kind of support for almost any imaginable feature in > Ada. What would be more interesting is specific war stories that > we could analyze to see how an additional feature might have > helped. There is a general-purpose feature that could be added to compilers, and which is already explicitly allowed for by the Ada 95 standard. If compilers were to provide a non-standard integer and non-standard floating point type with literals, assignment and, I think, no other operations, then implementors could provide various packages to provide SI unit checking, unbounded numeric types with literals and so on. Hmmm. The 'SIZE attribute is key, and needs to be user settable. Conversion of literals in source code should, in effect, use the same routines as for the largest integer and float types. If hundred-digit values need to be built at compile time, that could be left to the programmer, but it is a pain not to be able to use literals for zero, one, and two.