Re: Ada, calendar, and daylight savings

[Corey Minyard <minyard@acm.org>]

tmoran@acm.org wrote:

>>How are you going to do this in Ada?  You can't without using
>>non-standard constructs.
>>
>   It seems to me your problem is with your compiler vendor's
> implementation, not with the language.  The ARM 9.6(24) says
> "... as appropriate to an implementation defined timezone; ..."
> You want that timezone to be UTC.  Why not just replace the
> package body Ada.Calendar that your compiler supplies, with a
> different one that returns UTC for Clock?  (A long time ago
> my compiler vendor's Clock used the MSDOS 55 ms tick, which
> was much to gross for my problem.  So I replaced his Ada.Calendar
> body with one that used the PC's 8253 timer chip.  Not only was
> it much finer, but it was much faster than a system call, so
> profiling speeded up substantially. :)
> 

But what if I want a portable package that does this, one that works 
with multiple compilers?  Surely portability should be one of Ada's 
strengths.  Sure, everyone can write their own code to do this, but then 
everyone has to write their own code.  In the world I work in (telephony 
and geographically distributed systems), dealing with time is very 
common, and I want my system to be portable between vendors and I want 
to be able to interact with non-Ada systems.

-Corey