Re: 64-bit integers in Ada

["Marc A. Criley" <mcq95@earthlink.net>]

Robert Dewar wrote:
> 
> Actually, this kind of short range thinking (sorry I am too
> busy to learn how to do things right, I have too much to
> worry about) is really inappropriate to the Ada world and
> the world of serious software engineering. I can't tell you
> how many projects have a heck of a time porting legacy code
> because programmers have not given attention to the issue of writing
> portable code earlier on.

I can certainly vouch for the presence of this practice in the
industry.  I've done a few ports over the years, and so many times I
have to deal with problems that had the original developers spent just 5
minutes thinking about how to implement in an "Ada" way, rather than the
first approach that came into their head, would've eliminated the
porting problem and made the original code more straightforward and
readable.

The latest was the message buffer handling portion, wherein
Unchecked_Conversion, 'Address, and an Interfaced memcpy routine were
used to move the bits around from buffer to buffer, and to build and
unpack messages.  Variant records and assignment statements would've
worked just as well.

Although, software systems like these are really helpful for stress
testing source code analysis tools :-)

Marc A. Criley, Consultant
Quadrus Corporation
www.quadruscorp.com