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=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,a1ce307c10055549 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2002-12-18 11:21:34 PST Message-ID: <3E00C9AB.8040108@cogeco.ca> From: "Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020823 Netscape/7.0 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: calenday (was Re: IBM Acquires Rational Ada References: <3DF1615C.7AAAC86E@adaworks.com> <8db3d6c8.0212091445.12594821@posting.google.com> <3DF628C4.7090607@cogeco.ca> <3DF6653D.3030603@cogeco.ca> <8db3d6c8.0212101850.51506572@posting.google.com> <3DF8D33F.9020205@cogeco.ca> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Wed, 18 Dec 2002 14:16:59 -0500 NNTP-Posting-Host: 198.96.47.195 X-Complaints-To: abuse@sympatico.ca X-Trace: news20.bellglobal.com 1040239020 198.96.47.195 (Wed, 18 Dec 2002 14:17:00 EST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 18 Dec 2002 14:17:00 EST Organization: Bell Sympatico Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!cyclone.bc.net!torn!webster!nf1.bellglobal.com!nf2.bellglobal.com!news20.bellglobal.com.POSTED!not-for-mail Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:32049 Date: 2002-12-18T14:16:59-05:00 List-Id: Robert A Duff wrote: > "Marin David Condic" writes: ... >>And I wouldn't really characterize the need as relating to "weird" hardware. >>I've not usually found much problem, for example, getting a rep-clause to >>work to line up with some register word or other device. Usually, its a case >>of someone with a communication link packing things together as tightly as >>possible or from hardware substantially different from the thing doing the >>reading. You get odd-sized bit fields, things that span byte or word or >>longword boundaries, unusual numeric formats (1750a 48-bit float, for >>example?) and things of that nature. > > That's the sort of thing I meant: you're interfacing to something > (hardware or software protocols) that is "weird" from the point of view > of the computer hardware you're running on. Sometimes the compiler > supports bit fields that are "natural" for *this* computer, but your > data is coming from a computer with a different word size, or different > natural alignments, etc. Imagine trying to deal with 9-bit bytes as they had on the Honeywell Level 66 machines (36 bit words) ;-) No 9 bit bytes ever made it to the Internet (due to its octet nature), but if you had to create a hardware interface to such a beast, you may be in a different situation ;-) -- Warren W. Gay VE3WWG http://home.cogeco.ca/~ve3wwg