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From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Ada Portability... NOT!
Date: 21 Nov 1994 08:17:05 -0500
Organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
Message-ID: <3aq6kh$984@gnat.cs.nyu.edu>
References: <199411182104.PAA04854@mail.cs.utexas.edu>
 <3alalm$9di@gnat.cs.nyu.edu> <3aovl0$79m@news-2.csn.net>
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Date: 1994-11-21T08:17:05-05:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

Carlos, you wouldn't believe how many "bad" assignment "cases" I have seen
in Ada code written by various people, but that does not make me decided
that assignments are a bad thing.

Properly handled, unchecked conversion is a powerful and important part of
the Ada language, and is often a critical tool in writing portable code. By
portable code, I mean code that can be ported across architectures. 

Typically this involves writing code that is from a formal point of view
entirely implementation dependent, but which, based on rather detailed
knowledge of multiple architectures, which of course few programmers
posess, does in fact work.

It is for example quite possible to defend against endianness differences
using such approaches, but it is by no means easy.