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From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Flags in Ada?
Date: 26 Oct 1994 07:01:45 -0400
Organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
Message-ID: <38lcup$ibq@schonberg.cs.nyu.edu>
References: 
 <SPIEGEL.94Oct25113657@berlin.bruessel.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de>
 <38k89k$kfk@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au>
NNTP-Posting-Host: schonberg.cs.nyu.edu
Date: 1994-10-26T07:01:45-04:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

The natural way of representing flags, i.e. words in which individual bits
have names and can be manipulated is to use pragma pack (some implementations
may require you to use a record representation clause, but this should not
be necessary, and is a weakness in the implementation).

   type Flag_Byte is record
      Flag1 : Boolean;
      ...
      Flag8 : Boolean;
   end record;

   for Flag_Byte'Size use 8;
   pragma Pack (Flag_Byte);

That should work fine (certainly works fine on GNAT, where it is equivalent
to the obviously corresponding C declaration with bit fields of length 1)

If sometimes you need to regard this as an integer, then you need to use
unchecked conversion -- quite an appropriate use of unchecked conversion,
since you are asking to view the same data as two totally different types.