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From: mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Why don't large companies use Ada?
Date: 5 Dec 1994 21:48:33 -0500
Organization: George Washington University
Message-ID: <3c0je1$1ma@felix.seas.gwu.edu>
References: <3bcntp$dgj@gnat.cs.nyu.edu> <D07zvq.L3p@alsys.com>
 <3btgfs$m8c@felix.seas.gwu.edu> <3c05t4$ceg@gnat.cs.nyu.edu>
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Date: 1994-12-05T21:48:33-05:00
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In article <3c05t4$ceg@gnat.cs.nyu.edu>, Robert Dewar <dewar@cs.nyu.edu> wrote:
>if you are writing PL/1, you use ISUB to swap indices of arrays automatically
>

But the IBM chap who posted a note about this pointed out that ISUB
in fact _transposes_ the array. That's expensive in both time and
space. In Ada, because the storage mapping is unspecified in the LRM,
an implementer can choose to go column-major if his target audience
is doing a bunch of Fortran interfacing. 

Indeed, an implementation-dependent pragma could be used to let the 
programmer inform the compiler that certain array types were to look 
"Fortran-ish". This would all be perfectly legal, and - unless I am 
missing something really fundamental - not terribly hard to implement.

Unhappily, no Ada implementer took advantage of this opportunity to
make Ada more Fortran-friendly. Happily, Ada 95 standardizes the
whole thing with Interfaces.Fortran.

Mike Feldman