Re: Constant array declarations are not causing a compilation error when not fully initialized.

[Tucker Taft <stt@avercom.net>]

tmoran@acm.org wrote:
> 
> >how sophisticated such inevitable-run-time-error detection
> >must be.  In fact, Ada 95 goes further than Ada 83 in
> >terms of specifying cases where inevitable-run-time-errors
> >must be detected, but it clearly can't go all the way,
> >as that would require the solution to the "halting" problem ;-).
>   Today's PC's CPU is nearly 1,000x as fast as the original.  How much
> of that typically goes into faster compilation (ie, bigger programs),
> how much to more complex languages, and how much to increased
> compile time analysis?

It is true that more compile-time analysis could, and probably
should, be performed by modern compilers.  However, if you
are asking about what analysis is *required* by the standard,
that is severely limited by what we can require all implementors
to implement exactly the same way.  Almost all Ada compilers
go beyond the standard in terms of warnings they produce, but
trying to formally specify exactly under what conditions a
given warning is provided would be extremely complicated, even
for a single existing implementation.  The only real specification
might end up being the source code, which is clearly not something
you would want to standardize on.

-- 
-Tucker Taft   stt@avercom.net   http://www.avercom.net
Chief Technology Officer, AverCom Corporation (A Titan Company) 
Bedford, MA  USA (AverCom was formerly the Commercial Division of AverStar:
http://www.averstar.com/~stt)